The Fifth Annual AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition was held in Portland, Oregon, in conjunction with the Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The competition consisted of two events: (1) Office Navigation and (2) Clean Up the Tennis Court. The first event stressed navigation and planning. The second event stressed vision sensing and manipulation. In addition to the competition, there was a mobile robot exhibition in which teams demonstrated robot behaviors that did not fit into the competition tasks.

The 1994 Florida AI Research Symposium was held 5-7 May at Pensacola Beach, Florida. This symposium brought together researchers and practitioners in AI, cognitive science, and allied disciplines to discuss timely topics, cuttingedge research, and system development efforts in areas spanning the entire AI field. Symposium highlights included Pat Hayes's comparison of the history of AI to the history of powered flight and Clark Glymour's discussion of the prehistory of AI. This symposium (held annually since 1987) brings together a diverse group of researchers and practitioners in AI, cognitive science, and allied disciplines to discuss timely topics, cutting-edge research, and system development efforts in areas spanning the entire AI field. FLAIRS-94 was hosted by the Florida AI Research Society, the University of West Florida, and Florida State University.

To build a machine that has "common sense" was once a principal goal in the field of artificial intelligence. But most researchers in recent years have retreated from that ambitious aim. Instead, each developed some special technique that could deal with some class of problem well, but does poorly at almost everything else. We are convinced, however, that no one such method will ever turn out to be "best," and that instead, the powerful AI systems of the future will use a diverse array of resources that, together, will deal with a great range of problems. To build a machine that's resourceful enough to have humanlike common sense, we must develop ways to combine the advantages of multiple methods to represent knowledge, multiple ways to make inferences, and multiple ways to learn.

Dear Editor: ... May I also take this opportunity to praise the staff of the AI Magazine for a most informative and professional journal, and one which I find increasingly important for acquainting me with the latest progress in American research. I look forward to the continuing success of the Association in all its activities. Dear Sir, Yours sincerely, Marten E. Bennett Gzllingham, Kent, UK I would like to comment on something disturbing that appeared to be revealed at the recent I J C AI conference at Karlsruhe. The background to it is the "Marietta affair." At the industrial exhibition associated with the conference a Germany company, Marietta, was due to mount an exhibit.

The Atw office at 445 Burgess, Drive has been in operation for over a year; it has taken over responsibility for membership and the N Magazine, as well as continuing its management of conferences, tutorials, and exhibit, programs. The AAAI is financially solvent; asset,s of over $100,000 are projected for the end of the year; the organization is working toward a backup equivalent to one-year's expenses. Given a stable financial status, the AAAI can begin to explore other things to do with its resources (See next column for a statement summarizing AAAI finances as of 30 November.) John McCarthy will be President-Elect for 1982-1983; Saul Amarel, Michael Genescrcth, Peter Hart, and Raj Reddy, will serve on the Council for the period 1982-1985; Stan Rosenschein will complete McCarthy's term on the Council for 1982-1983. The membership is getting close to 2000; there were 1720 members listed before the conference, 160 of which were foreign; conference registrations should add 100-150.

I would like to add my support to Lawrence Hunter's proposal to modify the review process for the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (NCAI). For some time now, I, too, have been disappointed with the majority of papers presented at NCAI-not with the quality of the papers but with the conservative style. I would leave a paper session thinking that AI is progressing but at a painstakingly slow pace! Someone, somewhere must be doing some really innovative research, but why isn't he or she presenting this work at the premier AI conference? Allowing controversial papers but maintaining the quality criteria is a needed improvement for NCAI and AI in general.

Reactions to Darden Editor: We are sympathetic to Lindley Darden's intellectual program. But the various conceptions of abstraction which she discusses are, individually and collectively, inadequate. There are two problems, one concerning the basic nature of abstraction and the other concerning a mechanism by which abstract terms can be related to their definitional base. Darden comes close to the basic nature of abstraction when she asserts that "In difficult cases, forming an abstraction can involve more than merely dropping parts or replacing constants with variables. New, abstract semantic concepts might have to be introduced."

This article provides a historical background on the origins of AAAI, recounting some of the issues discussed and requirements to be fulfilled by the new society. It provides a personal reminiscence of some of the persons who founded the association, including Raj Reddy, Donald Walker, and Woody Bledsoe, and also recounts some of my experiences as secretarytreasurer and later president of AAAI. In 1979 he was the general chair for IJCAI-79, and I was the program chair, so we were already working closely together and thinking about organization. We were not alone in being frustrated by the phoenix-like nature of IJCAI--springing to life before every biannual conference, then dying, with little continuity. Also, it was obvious that volunteers from academe and industry had numerous distractions and other obligations besides IJCAI, so important deadlines could easily be missed.

The Fourth International Conference on Knowledge Capture was held October 28-31, 2007, in Whistler, British Columbia. K-CAP 2007 included two invited talks, technical papers, posters, and demonstrations. Topics included knowledge engineering and modeling methodologies, knowledge engineering and the semantic web, mixed-initiative planning and decision-support tools, acquisition of problem-solving knowledge, knowledge-based markup techniques, knowledge extraction systems, knowledge acquisition tools, and advice-taking systems. This was the fourth in a series of meetings; the first was held in Victoria, British Columbia, in 2001; the second was collocated with the ISWC meeting and was held on Sanibel Island, Florida, in October 2003; and the third meeting was held in Banff, Alberta, in October 2005. The conference was held at the Fairmont Chateau in Whistler.

The conference Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) was held at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland, from June 25 to June 28, 2008. More than 280 international researchers attended this singletrack conference to learn about the most exciting robotics research and most advanced robotic systems. The program committee, led by 16 area chairs, selected 40 papers out of 163 submissions. The program also included seven invited talks and two Early Career Spotlight presentations. The plenary presentations were complemented by 13 workshops.