Sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
The Sixteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-99) was held July 18–22, 1999, at the conference center in Orlando, Florida.
Hey AI Scientist! You Made It Through AI Winter! Where Are You Going Now???
We hope it was AAAI-99 at Disney World!
Far from the AI winter of the past decade, 1999 was great time to be in AI—jobs in academe, the government sector, and industry were increasing, funding for AI related technologies was on the rise, and—most exciting of all—technological advances outside of the AI field were presenting new challenges to our field and new opportunities for us to be involved in the scientific revolutions of our time. The 1999 AAAI meeting was aimed at catching this wave and helping us to gain momentum for AI as our field prepared for the next millennium.
The conference started with exciting workshops and free tutorials, and transitioned into a technical conference that included such highlights as Pat Winston’s talk “Why I Am Optimistic,” an invited talk by Nils Nilsson entitled “AI Rising,” a panel on “AI Spring” chaired by Kris Hammond, and “challenge talks” where experts helped us learn about some of the critical scientific challenges where AI could have a huge impact, including the Human Genome project, Space Exploration, new information technologies, and quantum computing, to name but a few. In addition, we continued some of AAAI’s most popular features such as the robotics competition, integrated software system demonstrations, and the 1999 mentoring tutorial, “How Not to Give a Research Talk” by Eugene Freuder.
Jim Hendler and Devika Subramanian