This series will focus not only on prominent accomplishments made in AI research and development but also on AIrelated events in society. As the first in the forthcoming series, this opening article features a historical background and outlines the contemporary AI research activities in Japan. It then highlights some recent prominent results from industry. Finally, a future perspective is given. The history of AI research in Japan goes back to the 1960s.

Some people believe that the expert system field is dead, yet others believe it is alive and well. To gain a better insight into these possible views, the first three world congresses on expert systems (which typically attract representatives from some 45-50 countries) are used to determine the health of the global expert system field in terms of applied technologies, applications, and management. This article highlights some of these findings. An excellent way to gain a global perspective on expert system technology, applications, and management is to examine the world congresses on expert systems (sponsored by the International Society for Intelligent Systems in Rockville, Maryland). The World Congress on Expert Systems was established to bridge the gap between the academician and the practitioner and concentrate on expert system work being performed throughout the world.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence now serves a global audience, and our members, meeting participants, councilors, and officers reside in countries throughout the world. Worldwide AI is designed to meet our expanded audience's interests. In the columns that will appear in this and forthcoming issues, readers will find a continuing source of news and information on significant research projects and accomplishments, academic and community events, and experiences fielding notable applications of AI. We expect that increased awareness about AI activities around the world will fuel new opportunities for communication and collaboration. The inaugural columns in this issue of Worldwide AI describe artificial intelligence trends in India and South Africa.

Artificial intelligence in Korea is currently prospering. The media are regularly reporting AIenabled products such as smart advisors, personal robots, autonomous cars, and humanlevel intelligence machines. The IT industry is investing in deep learning and AI to maintain the global competitive edge in its services and products. The Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning (MSIP) has launched new funding programs in AI and cognitive science to implement the government's newly adopted endeavor of building a creative economy and software-centered society. However, AI did not always flourish as it now does.

Reuters is a worldwide company focused on supplying financial and news information to its more than 40,000 subscribers around the world. To enhance the quality and consistency of its customer-support organization, Reuters embarked on a global knowledge development and reuse project. The resulting system is in operational use in North America, Europe, and Asia. The system supports 38 Reuter products worldwide. This article presents a case study of Reuter experience in putting a global knowledge organization in place, building knowledge bases at multiple distributed sites, deploying these knowledge bases in multiple sites around the world, and maintaining and enhancing knowledge bases within a global organizational framework.

It is the largest organization in Australia dedicated to ICT research. While it has close links with local universities, it is in fact an independent but not-for-profit company in the business of doing research, commercializing that research and training Ph.D. students to do that research. Much of the work taking place at NICTA involves various topics in artificial intelligence. In this article, we survey some of the AI work being undertaken at NICTA. National Information and Communications Technology Australia (NICTA) is the largest ICT research center in Australia, having been established 10 years ago in 2002.

"Nearly 10 years ago, the Department of Commerce issued a technology assessment of the U.S. artificial intelligence (AI) market.... The report estimated the 1993 global AI market - including technologies such as expert systems, neural networks, fuzzy logic, robotics, speech recognition, search, etc. - at about $900 million.... What a difference a decade makes…. In April, Business Communication Company (BCC) will release a thorough new study of the worldwide artificial intelligence market, which it predicts will reach more than $21 billion by 2007 with an average annual growth rate from 2002 to 2007 of 12.2%. In 2002 alone, BCC calculates the worldwide market was $11.9 billion…." Fledgling Robot Industry Aims to Fly High.

Although Switzerland is a small country, it is home to many internationally renowned universities and scientific institutions. The research landscape in Switzerland is rich, and AIrelated themes are investigated by many teams under diverse umbrellas. This column sheds some light on selected developments and trends on AI in Switzerland as perceived by members of the Special Interest group on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science (SGAICO) organizational team, which for more than 30 years has brought together researchers from Switzerland interested in AI and cognitive science. Artificial intelligence research in Switzerland began about the same time as in other European countries. Various teams in academe and industry in Switzerland worked on practical and theoretical problems of interest to the worldwide AI community.

We focus our activities on a few well-defined subdomains of artificial intelligence, positively avoiding dispersion and keeping a good balance between basic research and applications, and paying particular attention to training Ph.D. students and technology transfer. In this article, I survey some of the most relevant results we have obtained during the last 12 years. It was founded in 1991 and, since 1994, has been located on the campus of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. IIIA grew out of an AI research group at the Center for Advanced Studies in Blanes (Spain) that started AI research in 1985. On average IIIA has had about 50 members per year during the last 12 years with a peak of almost 80 members in 2012.

India is a multilingual and multicultural country that came together less than a century ago. The artificial intelligence community, which gained in strength in the 1980s, has had a major focus on research directed toward societal goals of bridging the linguistic and educational divide, and delivers the fruits of information technology to all people. In this article we look at a brief history followed by two examples of research aimed at crossing the language barriers. . Artificial intelligence in India has been pursued by a passionate few over the last few decades. It has not been as widespread as in Europe and the USA.