The Robot World Cup Soccer Games and Conferences (RoboCup) are a series of competitions and events designed to promote the full integration of AI and robotics research. Following the first RoboCup, held in Nagoya, Japan, in 1997, RoboCup-98 was held in Paris from 2-9 July, overlapping with the real World Cup soccer competition. RoboCup-98 included competitions in three leagues: (1) the simulation league, (2) the real robot small-size league, and (3) the real robot middle-size league. Champion teams were cmunited-98 in both the simulation and the real robot small-size leagues and cs-freiburg (Freiburg, Germany) in the real robot middle-size league.

The AAAI-99 Workshop Program (a part of the sixteenth national conference on artificial intelligence) was held in Orlando, Florida. Each workshop was limited to approximately 25 to 50 participants. Participation was by invitation from the workshop organizers. The workshops were Agent-Based Systems in the Business Context, Agents' Conflicts, Artificial Intelligence for Distributed Information Networking, Artificial Intelligence for Electronic Commerce, Computation with Neural Systems Workshop, Configuration, Data Mining with Evolutionary Algorithms: Research Directions (Jointly sponsored by GECCO-99), Environmental Decision Support Systems and Artificial Intelligence, Exploring Synergies of Knowledge Management and Case-Based Reasoning, Intelligent Information Systems, Intelligent Software Engineering, Machine Learning for Information Extraction, Mixed-Initiative Intelligence, Negotiation: Settling Conflicts and Identifying Opportunities, Ontology Management, and Reasoning in Context for AI Applications.

The CMUNITED-98 simulator team became the 1998 RoboCup simulator league champion by winning all 8 of its games, outscoring opponents by a total of 66-0. CMUNITED-98 builds on the successful cmunited-97 implementation but also improves on it in many ways. This article gives an overview of the cmunited-98 agent skill and multiagent coordination strategies, emphasizing the recent improvements.

The Workshop on Intelligent Information Integration (III), organized in conjunction with the Sixteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, was held on 31 July 1999 in Stockholm, Sweden. Approximately 40 people participated, and nearly 20 papers were presented. This packed workshop schedule resulted from a large number of submissions that made it difficult to reserve discussion time without rejecting an unproportionately large number of papers. Participants included scientists and practitioners from industry and academia.

Robotic soccer is an ideal task to demonstrate new techniques and explore new problems. Our intention in building a robotic soccer team and participating in RoboCup-98 was, first, to demonstrate the usefulness of the self-localization methods we have developed. Second, we wanted to show that playing soccer based on an explicit world model is much more effective than other methods. Third, we intended to explore the problem of building and maintaining a global team world model.

Three systems that generate real-time natural language commentary on the RoboCup simulation league are presented, and their similarities, differences, and directions for the future discussed. Although they emphasize different aspects of the commentary problem, all three systems take simulator data as input and generate appropriate, expressive, spoken commentary in real time.

Sony has provided a robot platform for research and development in physical agents, namely, fully autonomous legged robots. In this article, we describe our work using Sony's legged robots to participate at the RoboCup-98 legged robot demonstration and competition. Robotic soccer represents a challenging environment for research in systems with multiple robots that need to achieve concrete objectives, particularly in the presence of an adversary. We introduce the RoboCup context and briefly present Sony's legged robot.

I report here on the sixth meeting, held in June 1999. The Bar Ilan Symposia on the Foundations of Artificial Intelligence are a series of research meetings held in Israel every two years. I report here on the sixth meeting, held in June 1999.

The CMUNITED small-robot team became the 1998 RoboCup small-robot league champion, repeating its 1997 victory. This article gives an overview of the cmunited-98 team, focusing on this year's improvements.

The robot exhibition had a very successful 1998. The exhibition also included a published video proceedings for the first time. From a mechanical point of view, indoor wheeled robots were, as usual, the most common form of robot, but the exhibit also featured several outdoor wheeled robots, several legged robots, two humanoids, a snake, and a plant. From a software perspective, the exhibit featured general-purpose robot-control software, vision, teleoperation, language learning, teamwork and expression of emotion.