This issue features expanded versions of articles selected from the 2015 AAAI Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence held in Austin, Texas. We present a selection of three articles describing deployed applications plus two more articles that discuss work on emerging applications. Since then, we have seen examples of AI applied to domains as varied as medicine, education, manufacturing, transportation, user modeling, military operations, and citizen science. The 2015 conference continued the tradition with a selection of 6 deployed applications describing systems in use by their intended end users, 13 emerging applications describing works in progress, and three papers in a new category for challenge problems. In the first article, Activity Planning for a Lunar Orbital Mission, John Bresina describes a deployed application of current planning technology in the context of a NASA mission called LADEE (Lunar Atmospheric and Dust Environment Explorer).

Civil unrest events (protests, strikes, and "occupy" events) are common occurrences in both democracies and authoritarian regimes. The study of civil unrest is a key topic for political scientists as it helps capture an important mechanism by which citizens express themselves. In countries where civil unrest is lawful, qualitative analysis has revealed that more than 75 percent of the protests are planned, organized, or announced in advance; therefore detecting references to future planned events in relevant news and social media is a direct way to develop a protest forecasting system. We report on a system for doing that in this article. It uses a combination of key-phrase learning to identify what to look for, probabilistic soft logic to reason about location occurrences in extracted results, and time normalization to resolve future time mentions.