This article describes the winning entries in the 2000 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Mobile Robot Competition. The robots, developed by Swarthmore College, all used a modular hybrid architecture designed to enable reflexive responses to perceptual input. Within this architecture, the robots integrated visual sensing, speech synthesis and recognition, the display of an animated face, navigation, and interrobot communication.

The AAAI-2000 Workshop Program was held Sunday and Monday, 3031 July 2000 at the Hyatt Regency Austin and the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas. The 15 workshops held were (1) Agent-Oriented Information Systems, (2) Artificial Intelligence and Music, (3) Artificial Intelligence and Web Search, (4) Constraints and AI Planning, (5) Integration of AI and OR: Techniques for Combinatorial Optimization, (6) Intelligent Lessons Learned Systems, (7) Knowledge-Based Electronic Markets, (8) Learning from Imbalanced Data Sets, (9) Learning Statistical Models from Rela-tional Data, (10) Leveraging Probability and Uncertainty in Computation, (11) Mobile Robotic Competition and Exhibition, (12) New Research Problems for Machine Learning, (13) Parallel and Distributed Search for Reasoning, (14) Representational Issues for Real-World Planning Systems, and (15) Spatial and Temporal Granularity.

This article describes the winning entries in the 2000 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Mobile Robot Competition. The robots, developed by Swarthmore College, all used a modular hybrid architecture designed to enable reflexive responses to perceptual input. Within this architecture, the robots integrated visual sensing, speech synthesis and recognition, the display of an animated face, navigation, and interrobot communication. In the Hors d'Oeuvres, Anyone? event, a team of robots entertained the crowd while they interactively served cookies; and in the Urban Search-and-Rescue event, a single robot autonomously explored a section of the test area, identified interesting features, built an annotated map, and exited the test area within the allotted time.

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.

In spreadsheets, numeric data are represented as exact numbers and their mutual relations as functions, whose values (output) are computed from given argument values (input). However, in the real world, data are often inexact and uncertain in many ways, and the relationships, that is, constraints, between input and output are far more complicated. This article shows that interval constraint solving, an emerging AI-based technology, provides a more versatile and useful foundation for spreadsheets. The idea has been successfully integrated with Microsoft excel as the add-in interval solver that seamlessly upgrades the arithmetic core of excel into interval constraint solving.

By user-driven modeling for end users and near-optimal knowledge-driven scheduling acquired from human experts, races can produce parking schedules for about 400 daily flights in approximately 20 seconds; human experts normally take 4 to 5 hours to do the same. Scheduling results in the form of Gantt charts produced by races are also accepted by the domain experts. After daily scheduling is completed, the messages for aircraft change, and delay messages are reflected and updated into the schedule according to the knowledge of the domain experts. By analyzing the knowledge model of the domain expert, the reactive scheduling steps are effectively represented as the rules, and the scenarios of the graphic user interfaces are designed.

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.

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.

The Eighth Annual Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition was held as part of the Sixteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Orlando, Florida, 18 to 22 July. The goals of these robot events are to foster the sharing of research and technology, allow research groups to showcase their achievements, encourage students to enter robotics and AI fields at both the undergraduate and graduate level, and increase awareness of the field. The 1999 events included two robot contests; a new, long-term robot challenge; an exhibition; and a National Botball Championship for high school teams sponsored by the KISS Institute. Each of these events is described in detail in this article.

RoboCup is an initiative designed to promote the full integration of AI and robotics research.