Jan Lipavský became the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic on December 17, 2021. Prior to becoming minister, Jan Lipavsky entered government as a parliamentary representative. He served four years in the Chamber of Deputies as the Vice-Chairman on the Committee on Foreign Affairs and Committee on Defense. Likewise, he was on three other committees: the Standing Committee on Hybrid Threats, the Subcommittee on Migration and Asylum Policy, and the Subcommittee on Defense, Cyber, and Security Policy and Strategic Concepts of the Czech Republic. Lipavský specializes primarily in energy and international security and hybrid threats.

In recent years, the number of applications to the UTCS Ph.D. program has become too large to manage with a traditional review process. GRADE uses historical admissions data to predict how likely the committee is to admit each new applicant. It reports each prediction as a score similar to those used by human reviewers, and accompanies each by an explanation of what applicant features most influenced its prediction. GRADE makes the review process more efficient by enabling reviewers to spend most of their time on applicants near the decision boundary and by focusing their attention on parts of each applicant's file that matter the most. An evaluation over two seasons of Ph.D. admissions indicates that the system leads to dramatic time savings, reducing the total time spent on reviews by at least 74 percent.

For several years now, many members of the AI research community have expressed dissatisfaction with the paper review process for the National Conference on AI (AAAI). Accepted papers are almost universally written very conservatively, and many of the most interesting recent results have appeared in only specialty conferences, not at AAAI. The innovative, controversial papers that used to characterize the conference are getting harder and harder to find in the proceedings. Several efforts have been made by program chairs in recent years to improve the situation. For AAAI-93, an extensive effort was made to encourage reviewers to accept "innovative" papers.

IAAI has been held annually since 1989 and has been collocated with the national (or international) AI conference since 1991. The proceedings were published in book form through 1992. Since 1993, a conference proceedings volume has been published, and selected papers have been republished as articles in AI Magazine. This introduction briefly discusses the 1995 IAAI award winners and presents goals and plans for next year's conference. IAAI features real, deployed AI applications, selected for their innovation.

The 1998 Planning Competition at the AI Planning Systems Conference was the first of its kind. Its goal was to create planning domains that a wide variety of planning researchers could agree on to make comparison among planners more meaningful, measure overall progress in the field, and set up a framework for long-term creation of a repository of problems in a standard notation. A rules committee for the competition was created in 1997 and had long discussions on how the contest should go. One result of these discussions was the pddl notation for planning domains. This notation was used to set up a set of planning problems and get a modest problem repository started.

The Ipecac College Committee on Human Experimentation is mailing each faculty member the enclosed review of developments in the recent PortraitPrograms controversy. While the committee deplores the atmosphere of crisis, not to say hysteria, that now envelops the issue, the committee welcomes constructive comment: Damage control continues. Behavioral Taxidermy The PortraitPrograms Project grew out of hyperinterdisciplinarianism of the famed Gigabase Sculpture Group,l in turn stimulated by recent cutbacks in government support for the arts. The National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation had jointly funded the Gigabase Sculpture Project to foster the literary/musical genre of composing genetic codes for novel organisms. Later, artists trained in recombinant DNA technology designed massive Brancusi-esque statues of living cytoplasmic jelly.

The Fourth Symposium on Abstraction, Reformulation, and Approximation (SARA) took place at Horseshoe Bay Resort and Conference Club, Lake LBJ, Texas, from 26 to 29 July 2000, just prior to the Seventeenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2000) conference in Austin. Previous SARA conferences were held at Jackson Hole in Wyoming (1994); Ville d'Esterel in Quebec (1995); and Asilomar in Monterey, California (1998). The symposium grew out of a series of workshops on abstraction and approximation and on reformulation that had taken place alongside the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) conference since 1989. SARA is a meeting with an unusually broad subject area. From the earliest days of AI, abstractions and problem reformulations and approximations have been recognized as central to AI for reasoning effectively in complex domains.

Births are always interesting affairs. According to some, births are always traumatic-a shock to come from the womb to the world. The birth we give witness to here is that of a new society, the American Association for Artificial Intelligence-AAAI. It has not seemed to me traumatic, but rather almost wholly benign. In a world where not much is benign at the moment, such an event is devoutly to be cherished.

Alan Turing's decades-old question still influences artificial intelligence because of the simple test he proposed in his article in Mind. In this article, AI Magazine collects presentations about the first round of the classic Turing Test of machine intelligence, held November 8, 1991 at The Computer Museum, Boston. Robert Epstein, Director Emeritus, Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies, and an adjunct professor of psychology, Boston University, University of Massachusetts (Amherst), and University of California (San Diego) summarizes some of the difficult issues during the planning of this first real-time competition, and describes the event. Presented in tandem with Dr. Epstein's article is the actual transcript of session that won the Loebner Prize Competition--Joseph Weintraub's computer program PC Therapist. In 1985 an old friend, Hugh Loebner, told me excitedly that the Turing Test should be made into an annual contest.

This article reprints a section of the January 1980 "Chairman's Message" of the SIGART Newsletter (No. 69). SIGART is the Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence, of the Association for Computing Machinery. At the time of AAAI's formation, SIGART, with its 3,800 members, was the principal AI organization in the United States, and its primary activity was publishing the Newsletter. The field of AI is mature enough that a national scientific organization is needed. Much of the immediate motivation for forming AAAI came from a growing sentiment within the U.S. AI community for a regularly-scheduled national conference.