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AAAI-06: Twenty-First Conference on Artificial Intelligence

Sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence

Celebrating Fifty Years of Artificial Intelligence
July 16–20, 2006, Boston, Massachusetts

The Twenty-first National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-06) and the collocated Eighteenth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-06) were held in Boston, Massachusetts, at the Seaport Hotel and World Trade Center, from July 16–20. AAAI-06 Program Cochairs were Yolanda Gil, University of Southern California/Information Sciences Institute, and Raymond J. Mooney, University of Texas at Austin.

Invited Speakers and Keynote for AAAI-06

The keynote address was delivered by Tim Berners-Lee. Lee is director of the World Wide Web Consortium. Invited talks were delivered by Karen Myers (SRI International), Dan Roth (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Pedro Domingos (University of Washington), and Ken Koedinger (Carnegie Mellon University). The Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Lecture was delivered by Bruce G. Buchanan.

New In 2006!

Senior Members Track
New this year, senior members of AAAI had an opportunity to give a broad talk on a well-developed body of research, an important new research area, or a thoughtful critique of trends in the field.

AAAI Member Posters
The goal of this novel program was to provide a forum in which AAAI members can present and discuss their work based on a submitted abstract, rather than a regular AAAI paper.

AAAI Nectar
AAAI conference attendees had an opportunity to learn about results from AAAI’s sister conferences in a new special paper track designed to highlight those results in a way that is accessible to a broad audience.

Two Special Technical Tracks
For the first time, AAAI-06 had special technical tracks: one on integrated intelligent capabilities (inviting papers that report on theoretical or empirical studies that highlight the role of integration of multiple components in achieving intelligent behavior),and the other on artificial intelligence and the web (inviting technical papers on the use of AI techniques, systems and concepts
involving the Web).

AAAI-06 Offered a Broad Range of Programs for all AI Practitioners and Researchers

For AAAI Members: Member Posters and Senior Member Papers

  • Senior AAAI members gave broad talks on an area of AI.
  • AAAI members presented posters based on their work.

For the AI Researcher: The Technical Program and IAAI

For Junior and Senior Researchers: The Tutorial and Workshop Programs

  • There were fifteen workshops at AAAI-06.
  • For details on the schedule and descriptions for the fifteen tutorials, please consult the tutorial page.

For the AI Student:
The Student Poster Program and the Doctoral Consortium

Thank you, Sponsors!

Exciting Competitions Highlighted AAAI’s Exhibit Area

The Game Competition Raised the Stakes with a $10,000 Prize
The second annual AAAI General Game Playing Competition, held from May to July 2006, ended in Boston at AAAI-06, where Fluxplayer and Cluneplayer met in a final showdown on July 19 to compete for the $10,000 prize.

The winner of the competition and the Stanford Prize was Fluxplayer, a general game player created by Stephan Schiffel and Michael Thielscher of Dresden University. Fluxplayer won the competition with a score of 2690.75, beating out second-place finisher and defending champion Cluneplayer of UCLA (which finished with 25.73.75 points) by 117 points. Greg Kuhlmann’s and Peter Stone’s UT-Austin-Larg finished third with 2370.50 points. The AAAI competition was designed to test the abilities
of general game playing systems by comparing their performance on a variety of games. The competition consisted of two phases: a qualification round and a runoff competition.

The AAAI Mobile Robot Competition Demonstrated Cutting Edge in Robotics
Now in its fifteenth year, the Mobile Robot Competition for 2006 included the Robot Challenge, the Human Robot Interaction, the Scavenger Hunt, the Robot Exhibition, and the Mobile Robot Workshop. The AAAI-06 Mobile Robot Competition celebrated AI’s 50th anniversary with a scavenger hunt, where robots hunted for objects like a stuffed Winnie the Pooh. Winning the Scavenger Hunt this year was Kansas State University’s Willie, which used sonar to find ojects inside an area it had previously mapped. Other award-winners included Idaho National Labs (Judges’ Choice Award for Outstanding Human/Robot Interface) and UCLA (Judges’ Choice Award for Outstanding Adaptation of Current Research).
In the Human Robot Interaction competition, Université de Sherbrooke swept the award categories, winning the Judges’ and Audience Favorite categories and being the overall competition winner.
Details on the participants are available on page 18 of the program. Additional information is available on the Robot pages.

Last-Minute Addition: AAAI Computer Poker Competition
AAAI-06 held the first AAAI Computer Poker Competition. The University of Alberta’s Hyperborean won. The bot from Edmonton defeated four other competing bots, including bots from Carnegie Mellon and Monash Universities as well as two privately designed bots to take first place in the Bankroll (0.3925 small bets per hand) and Series Competitions (3wins, 0 losses).
BluffBot, the second place finisher, took second in the Bankroll competition (0.0954 small bets per hand) as well as the Series competition (2 wins, 1 loss).
Third place in the Bankroll Competition went to Monash BPP (Monash University, Australia). Third Place in the series competition went to GS2 from Carnegie Mellon University, with 1 win, and 2 losses.

AAAI-06 Exhibits Showcased Research in Action and in Print!

The AAAI Mobile Robot Exhibition Demonstrated State of the Art Robotics Research
The mission of the robot exhibition was to demonstrate state-of-the-art research in a less structured environment than the competition events. The exhibition gave researchers an opportunity to showcase current robotics and embodied AI research that did not fit into the competition tasks. In addition to research, exhibits that demonstrated how robotics could be used to enhance education in AI and other related courses were highly encouraged.

AAAI Intelligent Systems Demonstrations Showcased AI Implementations and Showed Research in Action
The IS Demos program showcased state-of-the-art AI implementations and provided AI researchers with an opportunity to show their research in action. Implemented intelligent systems allowed us not only to experimentally validate AI research, but also to make AI research accessible to each other, to the broader scientific community, and to the public at large. The list of demonstrations presented at AAAI-06 can be found in the AAAI-06 proceedings. Additional details are available on page 17 of the program.

AAAI-06 Exhibitors Showcase State-of-the-Art AI Products and Books
AAAI-06 exhibitors included AAAI Press, BAE Systems, Cambridge University Press, Elsevier/Morgan Kaufmann, Googe, ITA Software, Inc., K/Team / RoadNarrows, Microsoft, The MIT Press, Mobile Robots, Inc., Springer, and Yahoo! Research. Descriptions are available on page 16 of the program.

AAAI-06 was held at the Seaport Hotel.

Collocated Events

The following events were collocated with AAAI-06:

  • Fifth Americas School on Agents and Multiagent Systems
    Harvard University
    July 14–17, 2006
  • UAI-2006: 22nd Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence
    Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
    July 13-16, 2006
  • The Dartmouth Conference on Artificial Intelligence: The Next Fifty Years
    Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire
    July 13-15, 2006

Acknowledgements

AAAI thanks all the hard-working members of the organizing and program committee for their efforts in making AAAI-06 in Boston a success.