About Us

Who We Are, Our Policies, and Other Notes

Contents

Purpose
Policies
Complaints or Suggestions
A - Z Index
FAQs About Using This Site
Articles about AITopics
Related Articles
Kudos and Mail from Readers
People Working on AITopics
Project Notes

AITopics is a mediated information portal provided by AAAI (The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence), with the goal of communicating the science of AI to interested people around the world.

By offering a limited number of exemplary, non-technical resources that we have organized and annotated, AITopics seeks to provide visitors with meaningful access to basic, understandable information about AI. Each topic (see the SideBar Menu) and subtopic (see Site Map) offers a multitude of information to the user through the use of links to online articles, videos, and the occasional print resource.

AITopics also catalogs videos about AI stored digitally on other sites, or physically in institutional archives. For each video, the archive includes a brief description of the contents and personae of the video, one or more representative, short clips for classroom or individual use, and the location of the archival copy (e.g., at a university library). Any person may submit a video by filling out the submit new video form. Funding for this project is from the NSF (Award #0738341).

AITopics is a wiki where editors can edit, add, or delete pages directly from their browser. Readers may submit new content, which will be reviewed by an editor and added to the site.

To become an editor, send a message to aitopics11@aaai.org.
To suggest changes or for other issues, send a message to: aitopics11@aaai.org or edit the Project Notes page.

It is the support of the community and user contribution that allows us to provide the most useful content.

To further understand what you can (and cannot) expect from this site and to maximize its usefulness, we ask that you please read our Springboard pages.

Purpose

View our statement of purpose on the Policies page.

Policies

Our policy has always been to provide additional readings with more depth from published sources. Blogs and personal opinion pieces are not citable in scholarly publications, so we try to link to articles from refereed journals, book chapters, credible news sources, and occasionally university tech reports.

Please see our statement on Policies governing the selection of content for this site for more information.

Complaints or Suggestions

To suggest changes or for other issues, click on Contact Us on the top or bottom of any page. We will try to deal with the issue promptly.

A - Z Index

See our A - Z Index for an alphabetic list of the main subjects included on AITopics

FAQs about Using This Site

View FAQs about using the AITopics site on the Springboard page.

Articles about AITopics

AITopics

B.G. Buchanan and J. Glick. AI Topics: A Responsibility to Celebrate AI Responsibly. AI Magazine, 23(1): 87–94, Spring 2002.
- "The debut of the AI in the News column elsewhere in this issue of AI Magazine created a good opportunity to introduce the professional community to the AITopics web site, home of the AI in the news virtual page. Although AITopics is designed for the lay public, it serves a much larger audience."

AITopics - organizing online knowledge sources about AI for the lay public. By Bruce Buchanan and Jonathan Glick. Appeared in Deepak Kumar's Curriculum Descant column in the ACM publication: intelligence, Volume 12 , Issue 3 (Fall 2001); 25 - 30.
- "Widespread interest in AI resulted in the need for an online library filled with basic, understandable information on the topic. In this article, the authors explain the thinking behind a site that organizes knowledge sources in an effective and comprehensive way."
- The text we submitted is available in HTML format.

AAAI Video Archive

B.G. Buchanan, J. Glick and R.G. Smith. The AAAI Video Archive. AI Magazine, 29(1): 91-94, Spring 2008.

NewsFinder

L. Dong, R. G. Smith and B.G. Buchanan. Automating the Selection of Stories for AI in the News. Twenty-fourth International Conference on Industrial, Engineering and Other Applications of Applied Intelligent Systems (IEA/AIE 2011), June 2011.
L. Dong, R. G. Smith and B.G. Buchanan. NewsFinder: Automating an Artificial Intelligence News Service. Twenty-Third IAAI Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI11), July 2011.

Background: Scientists' Responsibility to Communicate

Much of what we do on AITopics is motivated by the responsibility we believe scientists have to communicate the results, methods, and issues of their work. The Smithsonian article is an elegant plea for more:
"We need to foster public dialog about science that breaks down walls, rather than builds them. Beyond the collaboration of educational institutions, this dialog must also include parents, science organizations, museums, media, and scientists and engineers themselves. Each group has to accept its responsibility to contribute to the dialog if we are to succeed in finding common ground and moving forward. Scientific literacy is rapidly becoming one of the great issues of our day, and the sooner we recognize the problem, the sooner we can begin to build the national effort needed to address it." From the Smithsonian on-line article on Scientific Literacy by Wayne Clough now Secretary of the Smithsonian Institute and past President of Ga Tech.

Kudos and Mail from Readers

Some compliments we have received and Mail from Readers

People Associated with the Project

See the page on Information about the people working on the AITopics site.

Project Notes

Information on our ongoing work can be found under Project Notes.

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