A wide variety of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, from expert systems to machine learning to robotics, are needed in the field of synthetic biology. This paper describes the design-build-test engineering cycle and lists some challenges in which AI can help.

Human control of vehicle swarms faces a dilemma: an operator must be able to exercise precise control over how a mission is executed, but controlling individual vehicles is not scalable. The Proto spatial computing lan- guage offers an intermediate representation, where the motion of a swarm is specified as a vector field, which is then approximated by the movement of individual members (Bachrach, Beal, and McLurkin 2010). I propose that this can be exploited to build a “tactical command” model of swarm control, whereby human “officers” dynamically decompose a swarm into units and task those units to carry out geometric and topological maneuvers under the constraints imposed by the platform. This abstraction may also allow situation awareness interfaces for individual agents to be extended to apply to swarm units.

We present an approach to identifying concurrent patterns of behavior in in-sample temporal factor training data that precede Events of Interest (EoIs). We also present how to use discovered patterns to forecast EoIs in out-of-sample test data. The forecasting methodology is based on matching entities' observed behaviors to patterns discovered in retrospective data. This pattern concept is a generalization of previous pattern definitions. The new pattern concept, based around patterns observed in trends of factor data is based on a finite-state model where observed, sustained trends in a factor map to pattern states. Discovered patterns can be used as a diagnostic tool to better understand the dynamic conditions leading up to specific Event of Interest occurrences and hint at underlying causal structures leading to onsets and terminations of socio-political violence. We present a computationally efficient data-mining method to discover trend patterns. We give an example of using our pattern forecasting methodology to correctly forecast the advent and cessation of ethnic-religious violence in nation states with a low false-alarm rate.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence was pleased to present the 2008 Fall Symposium Series, held Friday through Sunday, November 7-9, at the Westin Arlington Gateway in Arlington, Virginia. The titles of the seven symposia were (1) Adaptive Agents in Cultural Contexts, (2) AI in Eldercare: New Solutions to Old Problems, (3) Automated Scientific Discovery, (4) Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures, (5) Education Informatics: Steps toward the International Internet Classroom, (6) Multimedia Information Extraction, and (7) Naturally Inspired AI.

The goal of the Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI) conference is to highlight new, innovative, systems and application areas of AI technology and to point out the often-overlooked difficulties involved in deploying complex technology to end users. Those of us who have ventured out of the realm of pure research and tried to build applications to be used by our fellow humans realize that it takes a lot more than just brilliant algorithms to make an application survive in the real world. Each application that succeeds is worth celebrating and the teams behind them are due wholehearted congratulations. It is in this spirit that we bring you this special issue covering select applications from the IAAI conference held last year in Chicago.

The goal of the Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI) conference is to highlight new, innovative, systems and application areas of AI technology and to point out the often-overlooked difficulties involved in deploying complex technology to end users. Those of us who have ventured out of the realm of pure research and tried to build applications to be used by our fellow humans realize that it takes a lot more than just brilliant algorithms to make an application survive in the real world. Each application that succeeds is worth celebrating and the teams behind them are due wholehearted congratulations. It is in this spirit that we bring you this special issue covering select applications from the IAAI conference held last year in Chicago.

These underpinnings in genetics and fields are vast, variegated, informed by memetics, studying phenomena such disparate theoretical and technical disciplines, as coalition formation in an artificial and interrelated. Other applications provided an updated perspective ethical concerns related to the use of included case-based retrieval of to a previous symposium held in fall eldercare technology to ensure that narratives culturally relevant to a 2005 on the same topic. Some models focused One major theme of the symposium The symposium ended with a more directly on adaptation, from machine-learning was to investigate the use of sensor brainstorming session on possible solutions and game-theoretic networks in the home environment to for two real-life scenarios for perspectives, but discussions suggested provide safety, to monitor activities of ailing elders and their caregivers. The ways in which those adaptations daily living, to assess physical and cognitive exercise was helpful in grounding the might vary from one cultural context function, and to identify participants in the lives of older adults to another. Work was also should address real needs.

AAAI 2008 Workshop Reports

AAAI was pleased to present the AAAI-08 Workshop Program, held Sunday and Monday, July 13–14, in Chicago, Illinois, USA. The program included the following 15 workshops: Advancements in POMDP Solvers; AI Education Workshop Colloquium; Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms in Agent Systems, Enhanced Messaging; Human Implications of Human-Robot Interaction; Intelligent Techniques for Web Personalization and Recommender Systems; Metareasoning: Thinking about Thinking; Multidisciplinary Workshop on Advances in Preference Handling; Search in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics; Spatial and Temporal Reasoning; Trading Agent Design and Analysis; Transfer Learning for Complex Tasks; What Went Wrong and Why: Lessons from AI Research and Applications; and Wikipedia and Artificial Intelligence: An Evolving Synergy.