AAAI's National and Innovative Applications Conferences Celebrate 50 Years of AI

For the AI researchers and practitioners who convened in Boston on July 16–20, 2006 for the AAAI sponsored Twenty-First National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-06) and the Eighteenth Innovative Applications of AI Conference (IAAI-06), there was an atmosphere of celebration, collegiality, and continued innovation. The celebration of the first 50 years of AI began the previous week at the Dartmouth Conference on Artificial Intelligence: The Next Fifty Years. The celebration then moved to Boston where a huge turnout of AAAI fellows—from founding luminaries to 2006 fellow inductees—reported a great weekend meeting prior to the AAAI conference full of discussions and reflection in honor of AI’s fiftieth anniversary. The scientists shared their “group think” at a panel at the main conference. Chaired by AAAI past president Bruce Buchanan, the panel summarized the fellows’ reassessing milestones in AI, and striving to understand new problems on the horizon, which if solved would provide a leg up on the next decade of research.