All accepted papers will appear in the conference proceedings published by AAAI Press. Selected authors will be invited to submit extended versions of their Ingrid Russell, University of Hartford papers to a special issue of the International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools irussell@hartford.edu The papers Valerie Barr, Hofstra University should not exceed 5 pages and is due by October 24, 2003. All submissions will be done Zdravko Markov, Central Connecticut State electronically via FLAIRS web submission system, which will be available through University the conference website. Please consult the conference web page for details on paper submission.

Competitions were held at Since the first competition in 1997 (Kitano Fukuoka Dome Baseball Stadium from 19 to 23 1998), RoboCup has grown into an international June followed by the International RoboCup joint research project in which about Symposium on 24 to 25 June. It is one of RoboCup is an attempt to foster intelligent the most ambitious projects of the twenty-first robotics research by providing a standard century. RoboCup currently consists of three problem, the ultimate goal of which is to divisions: (1) RoboCupSoccer, a move toward build a team of 11 humanoid robots that the final goal; (2) RoboCupRescue, a serious social can beat the human World Cup champion application of rescue activities for any kind soccer team by 2050. It's obvious that of disaster; and (3) RoboCupJunior, an international building a robot to play a soccer game is an education-based initiative designed to immense challenge; readers might therefore introduce young students to robotics. It is our intention to use since 1997 and showed its epoch-making new RoboCup as a vehicle to promote robotics standard for future RoboCups. One thousand and AI research by offering a publicly appealing four team members from 188 teams from 30 but formidable challenge (Asada et nations around the world participated. It included al. 1999; Kitano et al. 1997). The humanoid league is a big challenge knowledge, this was the largest robotic event with a long-term, high-impact goal, which in history.

We can only state these relationships by adding axioms of some sort. Getting the axioms right, and getting algorithms based on them right, has not been easy. As a result, the basic situation calculus lived as a textbook curiosity for several years. Researchers interested in practical applications of temporal reasoning, such as automated planning, kept the basic ontology of the and execution. Haas (1987), Schubert (1990), and not hold true. To express the papers that have given new life to of Reiter (1991), breathed new fact that adopting a person makes the attempt to formalize realistic reasoning life into the situation calculus (Mc-him/her one's child, we might write in temporal contexts.

Hence, no training phase is needed. The local statistics define an with white lines; goals are blue and yellow; and expectation of "how the two sides of the curve robots are black with light blue or magenta might look." Second, refine the estimation of model parameters These stringent rules allow for simple mechanisms by (1) updating the mean of the estimation for object detection and recognition: in a maximum a posteriori step such that Segment the captured image into blobs of the the vicinity of the curve matches the expectation same color and interpret these blobs. To the defined by the local statistics and (2) updating best of our knowledge, all autonomous robot the covariance of the estimation based on soccer teams with vision-based perception apply the Hessian of the resulting objective function. However, because The two steps are repeated until there is no the RoboCup committee is planning to significant change in the estimated Gaussian make the rules more realistic, these objectrecognition distribution.

I'm delighted to bring our readers the news of an exciting resource for AAAI members. AAAI has now completed a major initiative, begun five years ago, to develop a digital library of AAAI publications. The collection now comprises approximately 13,000 papers, including the full set of papers from the AAAI proceedings, papers from other major conferences, AAAI workshop and symposium technical reports, selected AAAI Press books, and the full contents of AI Magazine. This already-extensive collection is a growing resource, with new publications and access methods to be added over time. I encourage readers to visit it at the members' library section of the AAAI web site, www.aaai.org.

Chair: Terry Payne (trp@ecs.soton.ac.uk) nators should contact candidates prior Tentative Organizing AI Alert newsletter, which highlights they be elected. The deadline for Committee: Lloyd Greenwald selected features from the "AI in the nominations is November 1, 2003. Please mark your calendars now for Stanford University. Be sure Symposia/symposia.html) and will be and the Sixteenth Innovative Applications to visit the AI Topics web site at mailed to all AAAI members. Submissions of Artificial Intelligence Conference www.aaai.org/AITopics/aitopics.html will be due to the organizers on (IAAI-04)!

Kernel functions can implicitly combine these two steps (nonlinear mapping and linear learning) into one step in constructing a nonlinear learning machine.

This eclectic keepsake provides a sampling of what can be found (with links to the full articles) on the AI Topics web site. Please keep in mind that (1) the mere mention of anything here does not imply any endorsement whatsoever; (2) the excerpt might not reflect the overall tenor of the article; (3) although the articles were initially available online and without charge, few things that good last forever; and (4) the AI in the News collection -- updated, hyperlinked, and archived -- can be found by going to www.aaai.org/aitopics/ html/current.php.

Simulations are an excellent tool for studying AI. However, the simulation technology in use by, and designed for, the AI community often fails to take advantage of much of the work in the larger simulation community to produce stable, repeatable, and efficient simulations. I present SPADES (SYSTEM FOR PARALLEL-AGENT DISCRETE-EVENT SIMULATION) as a simulation substrate for the AI community. SPADES focuses on the agent as a fundamental simulation component. The "thinking time" of an agent is tracked and reflected in the results of the agents' actions. SPADES supports and manages the distribution of agents across machines while it is robust to variations in network performance and machine load. SPADES is not tied to any particular simulation and is a powerful new tool for creating simulations for the study of AI.

Successes and Challenges" by Alon Halevy, University of Washington; "Constraint Satisfaction, Santa Cruz; "Self-Reconfiguring Robots: Challenges and Successes" by Daniela Rus, Dartmouth University; "Automated Verification Graphs, Automata, and Logic" by Moshe Vardi, "Quantum Information: Fundamentals the world have gathered each summer One hundred the conference is always after conference hours. Also among this year's invited As part of the American Association As In addition to the strong technical to advance the science and practice part of a special track on AI and the track of the conference, the Fifteenth of AI, the organization continues web, Henzinger will discuss the future Innovative Applications of AI conference to play a leading role in organizing of search engines on the internet, (IAAI-03) will be collocated with and sponsoring these annual summer describing work under way to IJCAI. Through the years, we have conferences. Other invited talks include "Deploying in a broad range of computer systems, Information Agents on the machinery, and electronic devices Because AI is an umbrella term for a of Southern California; "Web However, where is the newest, most This book looks at some of the results of this synergy among AI, cognitive science, and education. Examples include virtual students whose misconceptions force students to reflect on their own knowledge, intelligent tutoring systems, and speech recognition technology that helps students learn to read.