Every two years, a measure of the health of the Artificial Intelligence field in Europe is the number of submitted papers to the ECAI conference.
It is very pleasing to note that this year the number of submitted paper was 492, up from 443 in Berlin! The number of submitted papers is also more than the 470 submitted to this years AAAI. I think this is the first time ever that the submitted papers to ECAI exceed that of AAAI.
These paper numbers reflect very well on the size and health of the European Artificial Intelligence Community. At a time when AI is fading from the general press, the community is solidly growing. Our skills are now strong and we are able to make a real contribution to many areas of industry and society.
Attending ECAI-02 in Lyon will be a great chance to meet other members of the AI community and a chance to learn about not only the newest frontiers, but the traditional progress and newest applications. Start planning now to be at ECAI-02 and be an active part of the largest AI community in the world!

Rob Milne, ECCAI President.

NEWS from the ECCAI board and the ECCAI web site

CALL for ECAI-06 ORGANISATION

A unique candidate confirm its intent to bid : AI*IA
Paolo Traverso is in charge for the proposal : http://sra.itc.it/people/traverso/

ECCAI fellows Program for 2002 (http://www.eccai.org/fellow.php)

It is now time to nominate candidates for ECCAI Fellows for 2002.
Rob Milne is waiting the nominations by the end of April 2002.

Each ECCAI member societies nominate individuals whom they consider to have achieved unusual distinction in the field. The nominations must be accompanied with a CV of the candidate and three letters of reference. All documents included in the nomination must be written in English. These nominations are then considered by the ECCAI Fellows Selection Committee, comprising 6 ECCAI Fellows and the ECCAI Chair.

ECCAI Travel Awards (http://www.eccai.org/travelaw.shtml)

This year the ECCAI Travel Award Scheme supports participation to ECAI 2002. Applicants must be actively participating in ECAI 2002, such as presenting a paper in either a ECAI technical session or a STAIRS session or a workshop. Other active participation may be eligible. Priority will be given to applicants that are presenting a paper. Those wishing to simply attend the event will be considered as a lowest priority on the basis of need
The ECCAI Board has agreed to make available 20 Grants of 400 Euros

Deadline: 7 May 2002. Notification of the decision: 23 May 2002.

Send applications by post or email to:

ECCAI Travel Grant Officer:
Dr. Silvia Coradeschi
Orebro University
Department of Technology
SE-701 82 Orebro, Sweden
email: silvia.coradeschi@tech.oru.se

More details at http://www.eccai.org/travelaw.shtml

CONTENTS of Artificial Intelligence Communications

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

CONTENTS of Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence

http://www.etaij.org

NEWS from the ECCAI Conferences

- ECAI'02 hot news

492 submissions received for ECAI-02 and 22 for PAIS.

Among these 492 submission, 25 from Asia, 18 from North America, 15 from Australia and New Zealand, 8 from South America , 7 from Africa and 109 form France, 55 from UK, 43 from Italy, 41 from Spain, 34 from Germany, 27 from Russia, ...

Registration form is online at the web site of the conference : http://ecai2002.univ-lyon1.fr/

- STAIRS'2002

64 submissions received from France (21),Spain, UK,Italy, Belgium, Portugal, Germany, Irland, Sweden, Finland, The Netherlands, but also 6 submissions from Slovenia, Hungaria, Czech, Estonia and 3 submissions from North Africa
The main research domains are : Multi-Agent Systems, Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing and Case Base Reasonning.
The objective of the CP is to obtain 20-25 selected papers.

Additional information about STAIRS'2002 will be found on the symposium web pages: http://stairs2002.univ-lyon1.fr

NEWS from the ECCAI societies

- from SGES: The BCS Specialist Group on Knowledge-Based Systems and Applied Artificial Intelligence

ES2002: Cambridge, England, December 10th-12th 2002 : http://www.bcs-sges.org/es2002/

Full Paper Submission: 17th June 2002

- New AEPIA Board :

President: Federico Barber

Universidad Politécnica de Valencia Dpto. de Sistemas Informáticos y Computación
Camino de Vera s/n. 46022 Valencia (Spain)
phone: (+34) 96-387-9357 fax: (+34) 96-387-73591 email: fbarber@dsic.upv.es url: http://www.dsic.upv.es/~fbarber

Vicepresident: Ana Mª Garcia-Serrano

Facultad de Informática Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
phone: (+34) 91 336 7441 (7390) mail agarcia@cierzo.dia.fi.upm.es url: http://www.dia.fi.upm.es/~agarcia

Secretary: Eva Onaindía (onaindia@dsic.upv.es)

The NEW secretary of AEPIA (2001-2003) is now located at: AEPIA, url: http://aepia.dsic.upv.es/

- from Russian Association for Artificial Intelligence (RAAI)

The 8th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence CAI-2002 (with international participation) will be held on October 7-12, 2002, in Kolomna city (Moscow region).
It is the main conference of Russian Association for Artificial Intelligence (RAAI) organized every other year.

Deadline for the papers sent by e-mail (A4, 8 pages, 12 pts) is April 20, 2002. Submitted papers will be reviewed by the conference Program Committee.

Contact Vadim Stefanuk: stefanuk@iitp.ru

Other News

- Next ECCAI-Bulletin in May 2002

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