Sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
The Sixteenth Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-04) was collocated with AAAI-04 and held July 27–29, 2004, at the convention center in San Jose, California.
The Sixteenth Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-04) continued the IAAI tradition of including both case studies of deployed applications and papers on emerging AI applications. The deployed applications papers all included concrete measurements of the benefits provided by AI technology.
IAAI-04 was organized as an independent program within the AAAI national conference, with schedules coordinated to allow attendees to move freely between AAAI and IAAI sessions. We appreciated the cooperation of the AAAI organizers since we believe the collocated conferences both benefited from each other. AI applications developers benefited from learning about the latest AI techniques that will enable the next generation of applications. Basic AI research benefited by exposure to the challenges of real-world domains and difficulties and successes in applying AI techniques to real business problems. IAAI-04 addressed the full range of AI techniques, including knowledge-based systems, planning and scheduling, perception and monitoring, knowledge formation, knowledge management, learning, intelligent design, natural language processing, and diagnostic reasoning.
Deployed applications are case studies that provide a valuable guide to designing, building, managing, and deploying systems incorporating AI technologies. The 2004 papers addressed applications in a wide variety of domains, including natural language processing, secure mobile agents, sales support, securities fraud detection, and scheduling. These applications provided clear evidence of the impact and value that AI technology has in today’s world.
Papers on emerging applications and technologies described efforts whose goal is the engineering of AI applications. They informed AI researchers about the utility of specific AI techniques for applications domains and also informed applications developers about tools and techniques that will enable the next generation of new and more powerful applications.
The invited Robert Engelmore Memorial Lecture for 2004 was given by Dr. Edward Feigenbaum. Ed spoke about one of Bob Engelmore’s favorite topics: “The Unexploited Power of Blackboards.” Ed was the perfect person to deliver this lecture because he knew Bob from the time they roomed together at Carnegie Technical Institute (now CMU), and Ed is a passionate champion for the power of blackboards in applying knowledge to solve challenging problems.
For 2004, we were very pleased to have two in-depth panels. The “AI in Robotics” panel was moderated by Neil Jacobstein. The panel featured participants covering robotics at NASA, DARPA, Sony, iRobot, and Hasbro. Manuela Veloso provided her vision of the state of AI in robotics, including robot soccer and other developments. The panel featured a 360-degree view covering AI, systems engineering, marketing, business, and user adoption aspects of the topic. Robotics has been an emerging AI area for many years. It fuses difficult hardware and software problems to provide new capabilities for digital interactions with the physical world. AI in robotics applications recently began to rack up several commercial and government project successes.
The eScience panel was moderated by Yolanda Gil. eScience is an emerging way to conduct large and small-scale scientific enterprises. It leverages the power of AI in document management and search, collaboration tools, simulation, sequencing, and other forms of problem-solving. The panel addressed the multidisciplinary requirements of scientific research and how the growing cyber-infrastructure will support progress in the field.
Randall Hill and Neil Jacobstein