ECAI-02 in Lyon was very successful and we congratulate all those involved in organisning it for an excellent job, under the leadership of Alain Mille. The nbo-annual gathering of the European AI community was a great chance to learn about the latest technical developments, but also to meet other members of your field and the larger AI community.

ECCAI held its annual General Assembly during ECAI-02 where a number of significant decisions were made. These are summarised below:
(the minutes of that assembly are in progress).

The President's Report 2002 is on the ECCAI website
the new ECCAI board
- Rob Milne, Scotland, Chair
- Kris Van Marcke, Belgium, Treasurer
- Marc Ayel, France
- Silvia Coradeschi, Sweden
- Ulises Cortés, Spain
- Ulrich Furbach, Germany
- Werner Horn, Austria

new ECCAI fellows :
- Georg Gottlob OGAI, Professor, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
- Constantine Spyropoulos ETTN, Director or Research, NCSR "Demokritos", Greece
- Gene Freuder AIAI, Director, Cork Constraint Computation Centre, Ireland
- Gennady Osipov RAAI, Professor, Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia
- Felisa Verdejo AEPIA, Professor, UNED, Spain
- Daniel Kayser AFIA, Professor, University Paris-Nord, France
- Fausto Giunchiglia IA*AI, Professor, University of Trento, Italy
- Lorenza Saitta IA*AI, Professor, University Piemonte Orientale, Italy
- Boi Faltings SGAICO, Professor, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Switzerland
- Hans-Dieter Burkhard GI-KI, Professor, Humboldt University Berlin, Germany
- Gerhard Brewka GI-KI, Professor, University of Leipzig, Germany
- Helder Coelho APPIA, Portugal Professor, University of Lisbon, Portugal
  See the total list of ECCAI fellows
ACAI-03 will be July 28th-August 8th 2003 at Bremen (Germany)(see notice below)
ECAI-06 will be in August 7th-11th 2006 in Trento, Italy.(see notice below)

NEWS from the ECCAI board and the ECCAI web site

CALL for ECAI-06 CONFERENCE CHAIR
The Conference Chair plays a role of coordination and arbitration between the Local Chair (OCC) and the PC Chair (PCC). He has a global responsability on the conference.
Nominations for CC should be made by member societies or the ECCAI Board to the ECCAI Board.
The 2002 general assembly decided that the Conference Chair would be appointed one year before the name of the PC chair so that he can have an active part in the name of this last one.

Deadlines :
- 1 April 2003 : Nominations from the ECCAI societies
- July 2003 : presentation of the candidates and selection by the ECCAI General Assembly
The board would like to know if a society is thinking for a nomination asap. See the ECCAI procedures at http://www.eccai.org/ecaiproc.html

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

CONTENTS of Artificial Intelligence Communications

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

Volume 15, Number 1/2002

Learning of plan execution policies for indoor navigation by Thorsten Belker, Michael Beetz, Armin B. Cremers
DiKe - a model-based diagnosis kernel and its application by Gerhard Fleischanderl, Thomas Havelka, Herwig Schreiner, et al.
History-based diagnosis templates in the framework of the situation calculus byGero Iwan
Approximating most specific concepts in description logics with existential restrictions by Ralf Küsters, Ralf Molitor
Bayesian learning and evolutionary parameter optimization by Thomas Ragg

Volume 15, Numbers 2-3/2002

The impact of CASC in the development of automated deduction systems by Robert Nieuwenhuis
The development of CASC by Francis Jeffry Pelletier, Geoff Sutcliffe, Christian Suttner
The design and implementation of VAMPIRE by Alexandre Riazanov, Andrei Voronkov
E - a brainiac theorem prover by Stephan Schulz
A phytography of WALDMEISTER by Bernd Löchner, Thomas Hillenbrand
TPTP, CASC and the development of a semantically guided theorem prover by Kahlil Hodgson, John Slaney
Strong and weak points of the MUSCADET theorem prover - examples from CASC-JC by Dominique Pastre
New developments in Inductive Learning by Gonzalo Ramos-Jiménez
Transformation Rules and Strategies for Functional-Logic Programs by Ginés Moreno

CONTENTS of Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence

http://www.etaij.org

Our electronic journal, ETAI, has been thriving under the leadership of Erik Sandewall and is one of the pioneers in the area of electronic journals and rapid publishing. Erik has now taken over as co-editor of the AI Journal, which has resulted in changes at ETAI.

A new structure is being put in place with Wolfgang Whalster taking the role of Scientific Editor-in-Chief while Erik Sandewall continues as General Editor.

NEWS from the ECCAI Conferences

- ACAI'03

date : July 27th-August 6th 2003 at International University Bremen, IUB (Germany)
http://www.iu-bremen.de/ACAI03
scope : Advanced Robotics
Organizer : Prof. Dr. Andreas Birk

- ECAI'04

date : August 23th-27th 2004 at Valencia (Spain)
http://dsic.upv.es/ecai2004
Conference Chair : Ramon Lopez de Mantaras
Program Committee Chair : Lorenza Saitta
Local Chair : Vicent Botti

- ECAI'06

date : August 7th-11th 2006 at Trento (Italy)
the proposal : access to the PDF file
Conference Chair : decision on the 2003 General Assembly (see the call below)
Program Committee Chair : decision do the 2004 General Assembly
Local Chair : Anna Perini and Paolo Traverso

Other News

From Tony Cohn (IJCAI-03 Conference Chair)
- IJCAI-03 date : August 9-15, 2003 at Acapulco (Mexico)
- http://www.ijcai-03.org
- Submission Dates of Technical Papers
  - January 14, 2003 Electronic title page & abstracts of full papers submission deadline.
  - January 16, 2003 Electronic full paper submission deadline.
- Submission Dates of Poster Papers
  - February 10, 2003 Electronic poster paper.
  - February 12, 2003 Hardcopy poster paper.
- Tutorial and Workshop Proposals: October 1, 2002 Electronic submission
and from Carol Hamilton (AAAI)
Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-03).
http://www.aaai.org/Conferences/IAAI/iaai.html

From Jason Della Rocca
The IGDA's AI Interface Standards Committee is a joint effort of game AI developers, academics, middleware representatives and other relevant experts. The Committee will develop interface standards in such areas as pathfinding, steering, decision trees, finite state machines, rule-based systems, goal-oriented action planning and world interfacing. Check the Committee's page for further details : http://www.igda.org/Committees/ai.htm

From Max Bramer (Chairman, SGAI) max.bramer@bcs.org.uk
First Annual BCS Prize for Progress Towards Machine Intelligence: http://www.bcs-sges.org/es2002/miprize
ES2002 : December 10th-12th 2002 at Cambridge (UK)

Next ECCAI-Bulletin in October 2002

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