The planning competition has become a regular part of the biennial Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling (AIPS) conferences. The 2000 competition featured a much larger group of participants and a wide variety of different approaches to planning. Besides the dramatic increase in participation, the 2000 competition demonstrated that planning technology has taken a giant leap forward in performance since 1998. The 2000 competition featured planning systems that were orders of magnitude faster than the planners of just two years prior.

The Fifth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling (AIPS 2000) was held on 14-17 April 2000 at Breckenridge, Colorado; it was colocated with the Seventh International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR2000). This conference brought together researchers working in all aspects of problems in planning, scheduling, planning and learning, and plan execution for dealing with complex problems.

The Fifth International Conference on Genetic Algorithms was held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 17-21 July 1993. Approximately 350 participants attended the multitrack conference, which covered a wide range of topics, including genetic operators, mathematical analysis of genetic algorithms, parallel genetic algorithms, classifier systems, and genetic programming. This article highlights the major themes of the conference by discussing a few papers in detail.

Over the last eight years, four workshops on machine learning have been held. Participation in these workshops was by invitation only. In response to the rapid growth in the number of researchers active in machine learning, it was decided that the fifth meeting should be a conference with open attendance and full review for presented papers. Thus, the first open conference on machine learning took place 12 to 14 June 1988 at The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.