At IJCAI-2001 in Seattle, USA, 20 representatives of national Artificial Intelligence Societies worldwide met to discuss whether there should be some form of 'World AI Society'. I represented ECCAI as representative umbrella organisation for Europe. Representatives of the UK, German, Spanish and French National AI societies were also present, joined by people from AAAI, Mexico, Japan, China and many others.

It was agreed that it would be very helpful to know the contact persons for national AI societies around the world. Part of the purpose of this would be to provide a way to disseminate information on events and have contacts to encourage collaboration. It was also agreed that National Society representatives would meet every few years to discuss common issues, problems and opportunities. The final conclusion of the meeting was that a new 'Society' was not needed. AAAI agreed to enhance their web
site with information on a more global scale (as ECCAI has already done for Europe). semi-formal meetings will be tried for a time to give the concepts a chance to develop. The next gathering will be at IJCAI-2003 in Mexico. ECCAI can represent any of its member societies who are unable to attend.

Rob Milne, ECCAI President.

NEWS from the ECCAI board and the ECCAI web site

CALL for ECAI-06 ORGANISATION

The biennial European Conferences on AI is organized every even-numbered year, by ECCAI, jointly with one of the member associations of ECCAI.

The previous ECAI meetings was organized at Brighton (1974), Edinburgh (1976), Hamburg (1978), Amsterdam (1980), Orsay (1982), Pisa (1984), Brighton (1986), Munich (1988), Stockholm (1990), Vienna (1992), Amsterdam (1994), Budapest (1996), Brighton (1998), Berlin (2000) and the next ones will take place in Lyon, France on 21 - 26 July 2002 (ECAI-02) and in Valencia, Spain on 23-27 August 2004 (ECAI-04).

Guidelines for organizing ECAI : http://www.eccai.org/ecaiproc.html

Any member society of ECCAI may submit a bid to ECCAI for organizing ECAI-06.

A notification of the intention to bid is required by the ECCAI Board.

The timetable should be :

31 January 2002 : notification of the intention to bid
1 May 2002 : submission of draft detailed bids
30 June 2002 : end of the discussion between the candidates and the ECCAI board
July 2002 : presentation of the bids and selection by the ECCAI General Assembly

and

2004 : choice of the Program Chair

The bid will contain at least the following information:

Description of facilities (nature, number and sizes of rooms for academic sessions and exhibtion), geographical location, travel, accommodation costs etc;
Detailed budget with costings for fees given various levels of participation. The effect of inflation must be mentioned; the budget must be in Euro (and in local currency as well if desired);
a specification of who will be the OC Chair;
a statement by the candidate OCC that they understand and will abide by the ECCAI guidelines for the OCC;
a first version of a memorandum of agreement (for the ECAI) between the candidate organizing association, ECCAI, OCC and PCC. (This draft should be signed by those of the candidate OCC and the appropriate responsible officers for the candidate host organizing association [member of ECCAI].) Copies of draft memorandum of agreement are available from ECCAI secretariat. Deviations from this draft memorandum of agreement must be negotiated with the ECCAI Board before the bid can be accepted.

You can see the ECAI-04 bid at http://www.dsic.upv.es/ecai2004/

For additional informations, please contact Marc.Ayel@univ-savoie.fr

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE DISSERTATION AWARD 2001

Nominations are invited for the 2001 AI Dissertation Award sponsored by ECCAI, the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence. This Award includes a certificate signed by the ECCAI Chair and 1.500 Euros (which includes the travel grant for the Award ceremony).Eligible doctoral dissertations are those defended after December 1, 2000 in the general area of Artificial Intelligence. The dissertation must have been defended at an European university and the author must be a personal member of an ECCAI member society. Multiple submissions of the same doctoral dissertation to other dissertation award activities are excluded.

For details about submission, please visit: http://www.eccai.org/dissertation_award.html

CONTENTS of Artificial Intelligence Communications

http://iospress.metapress.com/openurl.asp?genre=issue&issn=0921-7126&issue=current

Volume 14, Number 3, 2001

Liliana Ardissono, Luca Console, Ilaria Torre : An adaptive system for the personalized access to news pp. 129 - 147
Gerhard Widmer : Using AI and machine learning to study expressive music performance: project survey and first report pp. 149 - 162
Csaba Szepesvári : Efficient approximate planning in continuous space Markovian Decision Problems pp. 163 - 176

CONTENTS of Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence

http://www.etaij.org

NEWS from the ECCAI Conferences

- ECAI'02

The ECAI CfP, the PAIS CfP are available on the web site of the conference : http://ecai2002.univ-lyon1.fr/

The deadlines are:

18 January 2002 : deadline for paper summaries (ECAI & PAIS)
22 January 2002 : deadline for papers (ECAI & PAIS)

- ACAI-01 from Hana Krautwurmova

The 9th Advanced Course on Artificial Intelligence ACAI 2001 and The 3rd European Agent Systems Summer School EASSS 2001 were joint in one event called “Multi-Agent Systems and Applications”, which was held at the Czech Technical University in Prague in July 2-13, 2001.
In total 29 speakers (including 4 US speakers) presented tutorials and lectures focusing on the current state of the art in the theoretical foundations of multi-agent systems as well as demonstrating the applicability of these systems in many practical tasks. The course attracted approx. 175 participants in total (73 % PhD students, 10% industry) from 29 countries (18% UK, 12 % France, 9 % Italy, 9% Spain). The participants evaluated the course very positively, both in the selection of speakers and topics.

The ACAI selected tutorials were published in the Springer Verlag volume LNAI 2086 (http://link.springer.de/link/service/series/0558/tocs/t2086.htm).

Presentation slides appeared on the ACAI web page – for details see http://cyber.felk.cvut.cz/ACAI01/

In addition to the ACAI 2001 course, four co-located events were organised: AEMAS workshop (“Adaptability and Embodiment using Multi-agent System”), ESAW 2001 workshop (“Engineering Societies in the Agent’s World”), the AgentLink SIG meetings and the meeting of the FIPA working group on “Product Modelling and Manufacturing”).
Currently, the post course proceedings volume to be published by Springer Verlag early next year is being prepared. This volume will include five ACAI 2001 tutorials, the selected papers of the ACAI 2001 - Student Sessions, AEMAS workshop and HoloMAS 2001 workshop (“Industrial Applications of Holonic and Multi-Agent Systems”).

NEWS from the ECCAI societies

- The chairperson of AIAI (ArtificialIntelligence Association of Ireland) is Derek Bridge

The AIAI site is: http://www.cs.tcd.ie/aiai/index.htm

Other News

Fifth International Baltic Conference on DB and IS : June 3-6, 2002 Tallinn, Estonia
http://www.cs.ioc.ee/~balt2002

Next ECCAI-Bulletin in December 2001

ECCAI Bulletin Editor : Marc AYEL ayel@univ-savoie.fr