A fundamental requirement of any task-oriented dialogue system is the ability to generate object descriptions that refer to objects in the task domain. The subproblem of content selection for object descriptions in task-oriented dialogue has been the focus of much previous work and a large number of models have been proposed. In this paper, we use the annotated COCONUT corpus of task-oriented design dialogues to develop feature sets based on Dale and Reiter's (1995) incremental model, Brennan and Clark's (1996) conceptual pact model, and Jordan's (2000b) intentional influences model, and use these feature sets in a machine learning experiment to automatically learn a model of content selection for object descriptions. Since Dale and Reiter's model requires a representation of discourse structure, the corpus annotations are used to derive a representation based on Grosz and Sidner's (1986) theory of the intentional structure of discourse, as well as two very simple representations of discourse structure based purely on recency. We then apply the rule-induction program RIPPER to train and test the content selection component of an object description generator on a set of 393 object descriptions from the corpus. To our knowledge, this is the first reported experiment of a trainable content selection component for object description generation in dialogue. Three separate content selection models that are based on the three theoretical models, all independently achieve accuracies significantly above the majority class baseline (17%) on unseen test data, with the intentional influences model (42.4%) performing significantly better than either the incremental model (30.4%) or the conceptual pact model (28.9%). But the best performing models combine all the feature sets, achieving accuracies near 60%. Surprisingly, a simple recency-based representation of discourse structure does as well as one based on intentional structure. To our knowledge, this is also the first empirical comparison of a representation of Grosz and Sidner's model of discourse structure with a simpler model for any generation task.

RoboCup is an international initiative with the main goals of fostering research and education in artificial intelligence and robotics, as well as of promoting science and technology to world citizens. The idea behind RoboCup is to provide a standard problem for which a wide range of technologies can be integrated and examined, as well as being used for project-oriented education, and to organize annual events open to the general public, at which different solutions to the problem are compared. The eighth annual RoboCup -- RoboCup 2004 -- was held in Lisbon, Portugal, from 27 June to 5 July. In this article, a general description of RoboCup 2004 is presented, including summaries concerning teams, participants, distribution into leagues, main research advances, as well as detailed descriptions for each league.

Not bad in the cash department, The items in this collage were selected (www.newscientist.com). 'In financial News" collection that can be found--complete than humans can track it--in whose Christie's spokeswoman Bendetta Roux When it comes to emerging technologies, aaai.org/aitopics/ Some items sold for well we know what we're afraid of, even Please note that: (1) an excerpt may not beyond what Christie's expected. Others though we may not know why. There is reflect the overall tenor of the item, nor didn't sell at all." no shortage of public debate about genetically contain all of the relevant information; modified crops, nanotechnology and and, (2) all items are offered "as is" and cloning.

Developed by the Bielefeld AI group, Max can imitate human gestures and exhibit humanlike synthetic speech and coverbal gesture while constructing an airplane from a construction kit in cooperation with a human partner. In an invitational bodily communication could be captured communication. Does a body need flesh highly acclaimed speakers from various Italy) who presented ongoing research and blood?, linguist Jens Allwood disciplines presented their perspectives on mode-specific lexicons, (University of Göteborg, Sweden) pertaining to conceptual issues such as "gestionaries," "gazeionaries" asked, or might wire and metal be of embodiment; the phylo-and and "touchionaries," as an equivalent sufficient, or a simulation in virtual ontogenesis of communication; bodily of dictionaries in spoken language. When apes can learn to control gestures; understanding and communicating How these ideas could be integrated a robot arm through an electrode intentions, emotions, in human-machine interaction was implanted in their brains, philosopher and symbols; and the role of bodily addressed by computer scientist Joëlle Proust (Institut Jean-action in language and speech. The Catherine Pelachaud (Université de Nicod, Paris, France) added, then talks were centered around the two Paris 8, Montreuil, France).

Techniques in this symposium series were he calls the "twenty-first century for analyzing terrorist networks (1) AI Technologies for Homeland Security; strategic threat triad," which consists were reported by Alphatech (2) Challenges to Decision of failed states, global terrorism, and and the University of Arizona. Popp noted that and retrieving information for Robots: Verbal Interaction with convergence of these three elements counter intelligence was demonstrated Embodied Agents and Situated Devices; is highly destabilizing and a key by Jim Hendler of the University (5) Knowledge Collection from strategic concern to the national security of Maryland. They also aimed to chart out future from Stanford University, Lawrence For example, systems that are research agenda by identifying specific Livermore Laboratories, SRI International, based on probabilistic or decisiontheoretic interesting issues in various and Syracuse University. Homeland security applications for unable to cope with change by themselves, The recurrent themes from data mining and mobile robots were as neither probability theory the presentations included the following: reported by Alphatech and the University nor decision theory says much about of South Florida, respectively. How do The highlights of the symposium let alone how they should be modified.

Running services in many small processes improves fault tolerance since any number of services can fail due to programming faults without affecting the rest of the system. While it is clearly important to be able to handle a wide range of failures, application authors should not be required to implement routines to test and react in every known mode of failure for every application, even if the failures are abstracted to a common interface. Thus, the framework also provides transparent fault-tolerance to users of system services. Errors in software and hardware are detected, and corrective action is taken. Services can be restarted or removed from the system, and clients are reconnected to the same service or to another service implementing the same interface without intervention from the application programmer. The Washington University team successfully demonstrated its failure-tolerant framework on its robot, Lewis (figure 6).

(EDOC 2005). In cooperation with the American Association for Artificial Intelligence General Chairs The 19th International FLAIRS Conference (FLAIRS 2006) will be held May 11-13 Philip Chan, Debasis Mitra 2006, in Melbourne Beach, Florida, USA. Coast" (centered around NASA's Kennedy Space Center), and has easy access to Florida Institute of Technology Orlando and the Disney World attractions. Submission of papers for presentation at the conference is now invited. Topics of University of Miami interest are in all areas of artificial intelligence, including: - Foundations: Knowledge Randy Goebel, goebel@cs.ualberta.ca

This article surveys previous work on combining planning techniques with expressive representations of knowledge in description logics to reason about tasks, plans, and goals. Description logics can reason about the logical definition of a class and automatically infer class-subclass subsumption relations as well as classify instances into classes based on their definitions. Descriptions of actions, plans, and goals can be exploited during plan generation, plan recognition, or plan evaluation. These techniques should be of interest to planning practitioners working on knowledge-rich application domains. Another emerging use of these techniques is the semantic web, where current ontology languages based on description logics need to be extended to reason about goals and capabilities for web services and agents.

After rigorous evaluation, 150 papers were accepted for oral presentation, and 79 for poster presentation. The analogical and case based reasoning category features 6 papers; auctions and market-based systems features 5 papers, and automated reasoning ... out over the Ocean, the winter State University), Amy Greenwald features 12 papers. Twenty papers sky is brilliant panoply of (Brown University), Marti Hearst will be published in constraint stars and comets, beckoning to (University of California, Berkeley), satisfaction and satisfiability; game adventurers... who seek to divine Sridhar Mahadevan (University of theory and economic models features its mysteries. Machine his year marks the twenty-fifth for Artificial Intelligence pioneer and visionary Jay M. ("Marty") learning, the category with the and the twentieth National Tenenbaum4 who will speak on largest number of papers, has 35, Conference on AI (AAAI-05).1 The "The Future of AI and the Web"; while machine perception has 6.

Today, approximately 10 percent of the world's population is over the age of 60; by 2050 this proportion will have more than doubled. Moreover, the greatest rate of increase is amongst the "oldest old," people aged 85 and over. While many older adults remain healthy and productive, overall this segment of the population is subject to physical and cognitive impairment at higher rates than younger people. This article surveys new technologies that incorporate artificial intelligence techniques to support older adults and help them cope with the changes of aging, in particular with cognitive decline.