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COPYRIGHT 2006 American Association for Artificial Intelligence
* The Twenty-First National Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the Nineteenth Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference commemorated fifty years of artificial intelligence research in Boston, Massachusetts this past July.
For the AI researchers and practitioners who convened in Boston on July 16-20, 2006 for the AAAI sponsored Twenty-First National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-06) and the Eighteenth Innovative Applications of AI Conference (IAAI-06), there was an atmosphere of celebration, collegiality, and continued innovation. The celebration of the first 50 years of AI began the previous week at the Dartmouth Conference on Artificial Intelligence: The Next Fifty Years. The celebration then moved to Boston where a huge turnout of AAAI fellows--from founding luminaries to 2006 fellow inductees--reported a great weekend meeting prior to the AAAI conference full of discussions and reflection in honor of AI's fiftieth anniversary. The scientists shared their "group think" at a panel at the main conference. Chaired by AAAI past president Bruce Buchanan, the panel summarized the fellows' reassessing milestones in AI, and striving to understand new problems on the horizon, which if solved would provide a leg up on the next decade of research.
Conference Radiates Vibrance
"Conference attendance and enthusiasm were both way up this year," noted AAAI president Alan Mackworth, "which tells me there is renewed vigor in the field; and lots of new and exciting recruits in the form of new students and researchers. There were lots of new faces."
"The conference radiated a sense of vibrance that was quite fitting for a fiftieth anniversary gathering of AI researchers and practitioners," remarked AAAI president-elect Eric Horvitz. "The meeting showed strong attendance from a wide span of ages and backgrounds. It sported a set of high-quality papers and associated presentations that demonstrated the breadth and depth of AI to address difficult AI challenges. There was a fun game playing competition, and a separate exhilarating poker competition." The highly popular Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition as always drew big crowds at the conference (a report on this competition will be published in an upcoming issue of AI Magazine).
"Attendance for the conference was 1,200," according to Carol Hamilton, AAAI executive director. "This reflects the upward trend that we have seen during the last two years with paper submissions and conference participation. The introduction of several new programs during the past two years, including special tracks on AI and the web and integrated intelligence, as well as the nectar and senior member papers, is a significant factor in this trend." Senior member papers are a way to collect reflections about areas of work by leaders in the field. Nectar papers are compilations and summaries of results presented previously at "sister" conferences in an attempt to provide an integrative pull back to the core of ideas being generated by affiliated conferences. Other innovations included AAAI member abstract and poster sessions, and a poker competition.
World Wide Web Creator Tim Berners-Lee Is Keynote Speaker
AI is having a significant impact on the web. For instance, recent AAAI conferences have seen talks by senior researchers at Google on the company's use of AI. Yahoo! has hired two AI pioneers: data mining pioneer Usama Fayyad is now the chief data officer and senior vice president at Yahoo, and Ron Brachman is vice president of worldwide research operations. Further, this year's conference included a new special track on AI and the web, and Google, Yahoo! and Ask.com all sponsored this year's conference.
In light of this vital link, the creator of the world wide web and now director of the World Wide Web Consortium, Tim Berners-Lee, was this year's keynote speaker. "It's a coup to have Tim Berners-Lee as the keynote speaker this year," noted Mackworth. "The web has transformed our society, and AI plays a significant role in that transformation. The synergy between his concept of the semantic web and AI science and technology will further that transformation." Berners-Lee...
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