Disaster rescue is one of the most serious social issues that involves very large numbers of heterogeneous agents in the hostile environment. The intention of the RoboCup Rescue project is to promote research and development in this socially significant domain at various levels, involving multiagent teamwork coordination, physical agents for search and rescue, information infrastructures, personal digital assistants, a standard simulator and decision-support systems, evaluation benchmarks for rescue strategies, and robotic systems that are all integrated into a comprehensive system in the future. For this effort, which was built on the success of the RoboCup Soccer project, we will provide forums of technical discussions and competitive evaluations for researchers and practitioners. Although the rescue domain is intuitively appealing as a large-scale multiagent and intelligent system domain, analysis has not yet revealed its domain characteristics. The first research evaluation meeting will be held at RoboCup-2001, in conjunction with the Seventeenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-2001), as part of the RoboCup Rescue Simulation League and RoboCup/AAAI Rescue Robot Competition. In this article, we present a detailed analysis of the task domain and elucidate characteristics necessary for multiagent and intelligent systems for this domain. Then, we present an overview of the RoboCup Rescue project.

In this report, I present a summary of the activities that took place during the Fourth International Conference on Autonomous Agents, which took place in Barcelona Spain from 3 to 7 June 2000.

This paper examines the role of biological constraints in the human auditory localizationprocess. A psychophysical and neural system modeling approach was undertaken in which performance comparisons between competing models and a human subject explore the relevant biologically plausible"realism constraints". The directional acoustical cues, upon which sound localization is based, were derived from the human subject's head-related transfer functions (HRTFs). Sound stimuli were generated by convolving bandpass noise with the HRTFs and were presented toboth the subject and the model. The input stimuli to the model was processed using the Auditory Image Model of cochlear processing.

This paper examines the role of biological constraints in the human auditory localization process. A psychophysical and neural system modeling approach was undertaken in which performance comparisons between competing models and a human subject explore the relevant biologically plausible "realism constraints". The directional acoustical cues, upon which sound localization is based, were derived from the human subject's head-related transfer functions (HRTFs). Sound stimuli were generated by convolving bandpass noise with the HRTFs and were presented to both the subject and the model. The input stimuli to the model was processed using the Auditory Image Model of cochlear processing. The cochlear data was then analyzed by a time-delay neural network which integrated temporal and spectral information to determine the spatial location of the sound source.

The Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference was held 18-22 July 1999 in Orlando, Florida. Ramasamy Uthurusamy was the Program Chair and Barbara Hayes-Roth was the Program Co-Chair. Although all the IAAI-99 papers and talks were certainly interesting and important, we present in this special issue of AI Magazine only a select subset because of page and other limitations. We include two invited talks and four applications as a snapshot of IAAI-99.

I was asked to give a visionary talk about the future applications of Artificial Intelligence technology; but I should warn you that I'm actually not very good as a visionary. Most of my predictions about what will happen in the industry don't come true even though they ought to. So I'm not going to tell you what the future holds; what I will do is to point out some of the technological trends that are at work. The outline of the talk is as follows: I'll start off by looking at the previous IAAI conferences and reflect on what we've learned from them. Then I'll look at what's changing in the hardware base that sets the context for all the computer applications we do. I think that will lead to interesting new viewpoints. Next I'll sketch what applications might arise from this new viewpoint. Finally, I'll discuss how the development of practical applications ought to interact with the scientific enterprise of trying to understand intelligence, in particular, human intelligence.

The Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference was held 18-22 July 1999 in Orlando, Florida. Ramasamy Uthurusamy was the Program Chair and Barbara Hayes-Roth was the Program Co-Chair. Although all the IAAI-99 papers and talks were certainly interesting and important, we present in this special issue of AI Magazine only a select subset because of page and other limitations. We include two invited talks and four applications as a snapshot of IAAI-99.

Enabling organizations to capture, share, and apply the collective experience and know-how of their people is seen as fundamental to competing in the knowledge economy. As a result, there has been a wave of enthusiasm and activity centered on knowledge management. To make progress in this area, issues of technology, process, people, and content must be addressed. In this article, we develop a road map for knowledge management. It begins with an assessment of the current state of the practice, using examples drawn from our experience at Schlumberger. It then sketches the possible evolution of technology and practice over a 10-year period. Along the way, we highlight ways in which AI technology, present and future, can be applied in knowledge management systems.

This article describes a methodology for programming robots known as probabilistic robotics. The probabilistic paradigm pays tribute to the inherent uncertainty in robot perception, relying on explicit representations of uncertainty when determining what to do. This article surveys some of the progress in the field, using in-depth examples to illustrate some of the nuts and bolts of the basic approach. My central conjecture is that the probabilistic approach to robotics scales better to complex real-world applications than approaches that ignore a robot's uncertainty.

With the growing importance of multiagent team-work, tools that can help humans analyze, evaluate, and understand team behaviors are also becoming increasingly important. To this end, we are creating isaac, a team analyst agent for post hoc, offline agent-team analysis. ISAAC'S novelty stems from a key design constraint that arises in team analysis: Multiple types of models of team behavior are necessary to analyze different granularities of team events, including agent actions, interactions, and global performance. These heterogeneous team models are automatically acquired by machine learning over teams' external behavior traces, where the specific learning techniques are tailored to the particular model learned. Additionally, ISAAC uses multiple presentation techniques that can aid human understanding of the analyses. This article presents ISAAC'S general conceptual framework and its application in the RoboCup soccer domain, where ISAAC was awarded the RoboCup Scientific Challenge Award.