The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Spring Symposium on Interactive and Mixed-Initiative Decision-Theoretic Systems was held at Stanford University from 23-25 March 1998. The symposium attracted approximately 30 researchers from around the world. Topics discussed included incremental model construction, user interaction, explanation generation, and applications.

Five teams entered their robotic waiters into the contest. After a preliminary round to judge the safety of the robots, the robots served conference attendees at the opening reception of the Fourteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

Book review of "How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker, W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 1997, 660 pp., $29.90, ISBN 0-393- 04535-8. Book review of "How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker, W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 1997, 660 pp., $29.90, ISBN 0-393- 04535-8.

Researchers and technology developers from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), other government agencies, academia, and industry recently met in Pasadena, California, to take stock of past and current work and future challenges in the application of AI to highly autonomous systems. The meeting was catalyzed by new opportunities in developing autonomous spacecraft for NASA and was in part a celebration of the fictional birth year of the HAL-9000 computer.

Robot soccer competition provides an excellent opportunity for integrated robotics research. All these tasks demand robots that are autonomous (sensing, thinking, and acting as independent creatures), efficient (functioning under time and resource constraints), cooperative (collaborating with each other to accomplish tasks that are beyond an individual's capabilities), and intelligent (reasoning and planning actions and perhaps learning from experience). Furthermore, all these capabilities must be integrated into a single and complete system, which raises a set of challenges that are new to individual research disciplines. At RoboCup-97, held as part of the Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, these integrated robots performed well, and our DREAMTEAM won the world championship in the middle-size robot league.

Modeling various aspects of language-syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse, among others -- by the use of constrained formal-computational systems, just adequate for such modeling, has proved to be an effective research strategy, leading to deep understanding of these aspects, with implications for both machine processing and human processing. This approach enables one to distinguish between the universal and stipulative constraints. This is in contrast to an approach where we start with the most powerful formal-computational system and then model the phenomena by making all constraints stipulative in a sense. The use of constrained systems for modeling leads to some novel ways of describing locality of structures and brings out the relationship between the complexity of description of primitives and local computations over them.

RoboCup-97, The First Robot World Cup Soccer Games and Conferences, was held at the Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. There were two leagues: (1) real robot and (2) simulation. Ten teams participated in the real-robot league and 29 teams in the simulation league. Over 150 researchers attended the technical workshop. The world champions are CMUNITED (Carnegie Mellon University) for the small-size league, DREAMTEAM (University of Southern California) and TRACKIES (Osaka University, Japan) for the middle-size league, and AT-HUMBOLDT (Humboldt University) for the simulation league. The Scientific Challenge Award was given to Sean Luke (University of Maryland) for his genetic programming- based simulation team LUKE, and the Engineering Challenge Awards were given to UTTORI UNITED (Utsunomiya University, Toyo University, and Riken, Japan) and RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia) for designing novel omnidirectional driving mechanisms. Over 5000 spectators and 70 international media covered the competition worldwide. RoboCup-98, the Second Robot World Cup Soccer, was held in conjunction with the Third International Conference on Multiagent Systems in Paris, France, in July 1998.

John Deere (Moline, Ill.), a manufacturer of agricultural and industrial equipment, has adopted a genetic algorithm-based solution to solve its factory scheduling problems. John Deere is using genetic algorithms to streamline scheduling at its factories, Sarasota County Detention Center knowledge in a system model and balancing an increasing number of (Sarasota, Fla.) has incorporated The center will use the The Royal Sonesta Hotel Boston Martin Marietta Magnesia Specialties new system to identify and confirm (Cambridge, Mass.) has deployed a (Woodville, Ohio), a producer of identities of inmates prior to being speech-driven automated attendant magnesia chemicals for industrial released from the facility. LucasArts Entertainment (San technology to automatically answer Primary objectives for the system Rafael, Calif.) has deployed a casebased and direct telephone calls, enabling are to increase production yet maintain reasoning self-service customer each caller direct access to a registered quality and decrease energy costs. This Report (Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio; Shanghai PuDong International Airport resource-allocation application evaluates www.lionhrtpub.com), The react to unforeseen events in real time.

After a summary of the rules, we outline the high and low points of the competition. Devising a sweep pattern on a bounded established in past contests. The only wrinkle uncluttered surface to ensure complete coverage concerned bag capacity: if the robot encountered is a well-formed and solved problem. A domestic or small office venue offered Points were awarded for cleaning the messes more complexity. The areas were smaller and (or just moving over them) and making contained more furniture.

In July 1997, the Sixth Annual Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition was held. The competition consisted of four new events: (1) Find Life on Mars; (2) Find the Remote; (3) Home Vacuum; and (4) Hors d'Oeuvres, Anyone? The robot exhibition was the largest in AAAI history. This article presents the history, motivation, and contributions for the event.