During the 2002 European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-02) was introduced the Starting Artificial Intelligence Researchers Symposium STAIRS), the first-ever international symposium specifically aimed at Ph.D. students in AI. The outcome was a thorough, high-quality, and successful event, with all the features one usually finds in the best international conferences: large international committees, comprehensive coverage, published proceedings, renowned speakers and panelists, subsidized awards, and an exciting social program. Considering the numerous benefits gained by the young researchers through such a forum, no doubt STAIRS will become a regular and well-established biennial event.

In this regard, the presentation of the three priority programs on agent technology, sponsored by the German Science Foundation (DFG), deserve special mention. André gave an Aachen, was the general chair. This description will transform the web into a workshops preceding the main conference. Except for the workshop on other things, how lazy unfolding of He spoke, among other things, about applications of description logics, concept definitions can dramatically ongoing efforts to develop a modeling fitting with the special focus of KIspeed up the computation of least framework for web services, 2002, all others were concerned with common subsumers in practice. Sponsored by: International Society of Applied Intelligence - Organized in Cooperation with: AAAI, ACM/SIGART, CSCSI/SCEIO, ECCAI, ENNS, INNS, JSAI, NRC, and SWT IEA/AIE-2004 continues the tradition of emphasizing applications of artificial intelligence and expert/knowledge-based systems to engineering and industrial problems as well as application of intelligent systems technology to solve real-life problems.

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.