He noted the shared interest of the members of this community in studying high-level cognition, structured representations, comprehensive system development, heuristics, and openness to insights into human cognition. The developments of the last five years warrant a new look at the issues. The five thematic articles in this issue offers such a look. The contributions are diverse and cover a representative -- though by no means a complete -- set of issues and opinions. Sergei Nirenburg's introductory essay offers a bird's eye view of the current directions of research in the field and suggests some aspirational issues that need attention for the cognitive systems community to make a lasting impact.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence presented the 2007 Fall Symposium Series on Friday through Sunday, November 9–11, at the Westin Arlington Gateway, Arlington, Virginia. The titles of the seven symposia were (1) AI and Consciousness: Theoretical Foundations and Current Approaches, (2) Artificial Intelligence for Prognostics, (3) Cognitive Approaches to Natural Language Processing, (4) Computational Approaches to Representation Change during Learning and Development, (5) Emergent Agents and Socialities: Social and Organizational Aspects of Intelligence, (6) Intelligent Narrative Technologies, and (7) Regarding the “Intelligence” in Distributed Intelligent Systems.