The events of the Ninth AAAI Robot Competition and Exhibition, held 30 July to 3 August 2000, included the popular Hors d'Oeuvres Anyone? and Challenge events as well as a new event, Urban Search and Rescue. Here, I describe these events as well as the exhibition and the concluding workshop.

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.

Like the well-known hsp system, FF relies on forward search in the state space, guided by a heuristic that estimates goal distances by ignoring delete lists. Humans have a remarkable capability to perform a wide variety of physical and mental tasks without any measurements and any computations. In more concrete terms, perceptions are f-granular, meaning that (1) the boundaries of perceived classes are unsharp and (2) the values of attributes are granulated, with a granule being a clump of values (points, objects) drawn together by indistinguishability, similarity, proximity, and function. The computational theory of perceptions (CTP), which is outlined in this article, adds to the armamentarium of AI a capability to compute and reason with perception-based information.

The Third International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning was held at the Seeon Monastery, Bavaria, 27 to 30 July 1999. About 120 researchers from 21 countries attended. The conference included 4 workshops; 3 invit-ed talks; 24 technical presentations; a poster session; and an Industry Day, where the focus was on mature technologies and applications in industry.

Unlike and Exhibition, held 30 July to 3 other contests over the years, there were no August 2000 in Austin, Texas. This year's event artificial walls or constraints in this brought six contest teams and nine exhibition event--the robots had to interact with regular teams from the United States and Canada. Robots were judged on to compete and demonstrate state-ofthe-art the quality of their interactions, coverage, research in robotics and AI (figure 1). An article by the winning team, The competition and exhibition is actually which better describes their approach and made up of multiple events: several contests, a robot, can be found in this issue of AI Magazine. Kortenkamp, Nourbakhsh, and Hinkle (1997); In January 2000, a suggestion was made to Arkin (1998); and Meeden et al. (2000).

The seventh biennial Bar-Ilan International Symposium on the Foundations of Artificial Intelligence, will be held on June 25-27, 2001 in Ramat Gan, Israel. The meeting will honor the research and accomplishments of Yaacov Choueka and will therefore place special emphasis on natural language processing and computational linguistics, in addition to the usual topics of the symposium. Yaacov Choueka Jieh Hsiang Daphne Koller Richard Korf Doug Lenat Moshe Vardi The BISFAI-01 program, schedule and registration information will be available at the BISFAI website: www.cs.biu.ac.il/ bisfai, along with abstracts of invited and accepted papers and pointers to online versions.For further information or requests, contact: bisfai@cs.biu.ac.il. CONTEXT-01 EST Setubal, Campus do IPS / R. Vale www.dfki.de/um2001 Faculty Positions for Intelligent Aerospace Systems Program The College of Engineering at the University of Oklahoma invites applications for 3 to 5 new faculty positions at all levels in the area of Intelligent Systems.

Built on seven hills, with unmatched mountain and water views, the wealth of natural beauty in and around Seattle astonishes first-time visitors. Olympic Mountains are to the west. The Washington State Convention 01 is cosponsored by AAAI. Ballard Locks, and the new Experience Approach for Representing Uncertainty" quantity, provided that the use of The monorail by Joseph Y. Halpern, Cornell such excerpts is personal and does not Space Needle and the Experience Music Agents in Adversarial Environments" program is included in your There will IJCAI will welcome three collocated next year and beyond. AI Journal, please contact membership@aaai.org

LBD is a curriculum consisting of prescribed exercises that teach children real-world skills by ciently, and replan after device faults having them perform several activities Conference of the Florida caused the original plan to become that are familiar to them. The cochairs of about the computer's role in the current The conference also had two panel the conference were Avelino Gonzalez, revolution in cognitive science. The first focused on modern University of Central Florida, and His talk came from a historical perspective--how trends in funding opportunities Massood Towhidnejad, Embry-Riddle humankind has always for AI, moderated by Ingrid Russell of Aeronautical University. The program felt an overwhelming need to understand the University of Hartford. This group chairs were Bill Manaris and Jim the world around us and to control included an impressive list of panelists: Etheredge, both of the University of it for our own benefit.

We are interested in solving real-world planning problems and, to that end, argue for the use of domain knowledge in planning. We believe that the field must develop methods capable of using rich knowledge models to make planning tools useful for complex problems. We discuss the suitability of current planning paradigms for solving these problems. In particular, we compare knowledge rich approaches such as hierarchical task network planning to minimal-knowledge methods such as STRIPS-based planners and disjunctive planners. We argue that the former methods have advantages such as scalability, expressiveness, continuous plan modification during execution, and the ability to interact with humans. However, these planners also have limitations, such as requiring complete domain models and failing to model uncertainty, that often make them inadequate for real-world problems. In this article, we define the terms knowledge-based and primitive-action planning and argue for the use of knowledge-based planning as a paradigm for solving real-world problems. We next summarize some of the characteristics of real-world problems that we are interested in addressing. Several current real-world planning applications are described, focusing on the ways in which knowledge is brought to bear on the planning problem. We describe some existing knowledge-based approaches and then discuss additional capabilities, beyond those available in existing systems, that are needed. Finally, we draw an analogy from the current focus of the planning community on disjunctive planners to the experiences of the machine learning community over the past decade.

In this article, we describe some recent results and trends concerning hybrid neural symbolic systems based on a recent workshop on hybrid neural symbolic integration. The Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) workshop on hybrid neural symbolic integration, organized by Stefan Wermter and Ron Sun, was held on 4 to 5 December 1998 in Breckenridge, Colorado.