The Fourth International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context (CONTEXT-03) took place at the Stanford University Center for the Study of Language and Information in Stanford, California, on 23 to 25 June 2003. Like the previous conferences, CONTEXT-03 fulfilled its aim of bringing together representatives of many different research areas, spanning the whole range of the cognitive and information sciences, and with interests ranging from the use of context in specific, commercial applications to highly general philosophical, psychological, and logical theories. The conference chair was Fausto Giunchiglia, University of Trento. The program chairs were Patrick Blackburn, INRIA Lorraine; Chiara Ghidini, the Centre for Scientific and Technological Research in Trento; and Roy Turner, University of Maine. There were 77 submissions, from which 31 papers and 14 posters were selected. One of the aims of the CONTEXT conferences is to bring together representatives of ...

You are cordially invited to become a member of the AI Community's principal scientific society: Both these facts run counter to other connectionist models but easily fit SDM. Sparse Distributed Memory will be of interest to anyone doing research in neural models or brain physiology. As the theory is refined, the book will also be of interest to those trying to find applications for neural models. Finally, it will be fascinating to anyone who is even slightly curious about human intelligence and how it might arise from the brain. Terry Rooker is a graduate student at the Oregon Graduate Institute.

A number of approaches have been advanced for taking data about a user's likes and dislikes and generating a general profile of the user. These profiles can be used to retrieve documents matching user interests; recommend music, movies, or other similar products; or carry out other tasks in a specialized fashion. This article presents a fundamentally new method for generating user profiles that takes advantage of a large-scale database of demographic data. These data are used to generalize user-specified data along the patterns common across the population, including areas not represented in the user's original data. The input data most often take the form of samples of the user's interests or preferences in a given area, and the profile is a generalization of these data that can be used generatively to carry out tasks on behalf of the user.

The Third Workshop on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises was held from 17-19 April 1994 in Morgantown, West Virginia, hosted by the Concurrent Engineering Research Center at West Virginia University. This report summarizes this year's workshop and outlines the philosophy behind this annual event. This report summarizes this year's workshop and outlines the philosophy behind this annual event. The WET ICE workshop, now in its third year, has become a fixture of the collaborative computing scene. A more specialized event than the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work gathering, which takes in everyone from anthropologists to futurists, this workshop focuses on hardware and software that enables agents of all kinds to interact in a variety of ways to accomplish some task--quickly, correctly, and easily.

For several decades, there has been another face to the field, a technological one that provides tools for solving practical problems in various domains. Of these domains, engineering and medicine have had the closest interaction with AI. AI ideas in representation and reasoning have been especially relevant to diagnosis and corrective action planning in both domains, and in engineering, design has been another area of very fruitful collaboration. These disciplines have not been mere consumers of AI ideas and technology, however. They have had a deep effect on the theoretical side of AI. Complex real-world reasoning tasks, such as those in engineering and medicine, bring out the inadequacy of purely theoretical conceptions about the nature of intelligence. The enormous amounts and types of knowledge often required for carrying out practical reasoning, and the variety of inference techniques that are displayed by practitioners, and the need to arrive at conclusions rapidly--these ...

A recent article by Ronald Brachman (Brachman, 1985) points out some philosophical or semantic problems in using the notion of a prototype, which is described by using default properties. The problem arises since default properties can be overridden or cancelled in representing particular instances, and therefore lack definitional power: i.e., they are not really essential to the concept being represented. As an example, Brachman presents an elephant joke: Q: What's big and gray, has a trunk, and lives in the trees? A: An elephant-I lied about the trees. Before discussing a solution to this dilemma, consider the following modified version of the elephant joke, perhaps not quite as funny: Q: What's big and gray, has a trunk, and lives in the trees?

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.

RoboCup is no longer just the Soccer World Cup for autonomous robots but has evolved to become a coordinated initiative encompassing four different robotics events: (1) Soccer, (2) Rescue, (3) Junior (focused on education), and (4) a Scientific Symposium. RoboCup-2003 took place from 2 to 11 July 2003 in Padua (Italy); it was colocated with other scientific events in the field of AI and robotics. In this article, in addition to reporting on the results of the games, we highlight the robotics and AI technologies exploited by the teams in the different leagues and describe the most meaningful scientific contributions. As the charter of the International RoboCup Federation states, "RoboCup is an international research and education initiative. It is an attempt to foster AI and intelligent robotics research by providing a standard problem where a wide range of technologies can be integrated and examined [...]."

In numerous distributed environments, including today's World Wide Web, enterprise data management systems, large science projects, and the emerging semantic web, applications will inevitably use the information described by multiple ontologies and schemas. We organized the Workshop on Semantic Integration at the Second International Semantic Web Conference to bring together different communities working on the issues of enabling integration among different resources. The workshop generated a lot of interest and attracted more than 70 participants. Interoperability among applications depends critically on the ability to map between them. Semantic integration issues have now become a key bottleneck in the deployment of a wide variety of information management applications.

RoboCup is an initiative designed to promote the full integration of AI and robotics research. Following the success of the first RoboCup in 1997 at Nagoya (Kitano 1998; Noda et al. 1998) and the second RoboCup in Paris in 1998 (Asada et al. 2000; Asada and Kitano 1999), the Third Robot World Cup Soccer Games and Conferences, RoboCup-99, were held in Stockholm from 27 July to 4 August 1999 in conjunction with the Sixteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-99). There were four different leagues: (1) the simulation league, (2) the smallsize real robot league, (3) the middle-size real robot league, and (4) the Sony legged robot league. RoboCup-2000, the Fourth Robot World Cup Soccer Games and Conferences, will take place in Melbourne, Australia, in August 2000. It was organized by Linköping University with the cooperation of Stockholm University, and it was sponsored by Sony Corporation, Sun Microsystems, Futurniture, First Hotel, The Foundation for Knowledge and Competence Development, The Swedish Council for Planning and Coordination of Research, The Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research, the Swedish National Board for Industrial and Technical Development, and the Wallenberg Laboratory for Research on Information Technology and Autonomous Systems.