The fall of 2002 marked the passing of Ray Reiter, for whom a memorial article by Jack Minker appears in this issue. As the issue was going to press, AI lost Saul Amarel, Norm Nielsen, and Charles Rosen. We thank Tom Mitchell and Casimir Kulikowski for their memorial to Saul Amarel, Ray Perrault for his remembrance of Norm Nielsen, and Peter Hart and Nils Nilsson for their tribute to Charles Rosen. The AI community mourns our lost colleagues and gratefully remembers their contributions, which meant so much to so many and to the advancement of artificial intelligence as a whole. The foundation of Charlie's creativity was his broad knowledge.

Dr. Saul Amarel, who helped develop the field of artificial intelligence and founded the computer science department at Rutgers University, died on Wednesday in Princeton, N.J., where he lived. The cause was complications of cancer, according to Rutgers. At Rutgers, Dr. Amarel developed computer time-sharing, and his laboratory became an early node on Arpanet, the precursor to the Internet. He took a leave in the 1980's to spend a few years directing a computer science program at the Pentagon, and returned to Rutgers in 1988. Among his peers, Dr. Amarel was perhaps best known for a paper he wrote in 1968, which put him at the vanguard of the artificial intelligence movement.

In the span of a few months, the AI community lost four important figures. The fall of 2002 marked the passing of Ray Reiter, for whom a memorial article by Jack Minker appears in this issue. As the issue was going to press, AI lost Saul Amarel, Norm Nielsen, and Charles Rosen. This section of AI Magazine commemorates these friends, leaders, and AI pioneers. We thank Tom Mitchell and Casimir Kulikowski for their memorial to Saul Amarel, Ray Perrault for his remembrance of Norm Nielsen, and Peter Hart and Nils Nilsson for their tribute to Charles Rosen. The AI community mourns our lost colleagues and gratefully remembers their contributions, which meant so much to so many and to the advancement of artificial intelligence as a whole.

The Fourth International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence (ISAI) was held in Cancun, Mexico, 13-15 November 1991. What, another international AI conference, you say? In Mexico? Yes. The first symposium was held in 1988. This fourth consecutive annual conference drew the participation of visitors from several international AI communities, including the United States, Mexico, Canada, Germany, Japan, England, France, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain, China, Belgium, Australia, and Singapore -- an impressive breadth of participants for a conference that has existed for only four years.

The founding of a new college at Rutgers in 1969 became the occasion for building a strong computer science presence in the University. Livingston College thus provided the home for the newly organized Department of Computer Science (DCS) and for the beginning of computer science research at Rutgers.

Research by members of the Department of Computer Science at Rutgers, and by their collaborators, is organized within the Laboratory for Computer Science research(LCSR). AI and AI-related applications are the major area of research within LCSR, with about forty people-faculty, staff and graduate students-currently involved in various aspects of AI research.