This workshop is intended to refocus the field of artificial intelligence (AI) on its traditional goal: to understand the nature of cognition and its embodiment in human and artificial systems. The success of the field of AI can be seen in major accomplishments throughout the past decade including the beating of the best human chess player by a computer, the autonomous operation of robots on Mars and the autonomous control of the Deep Space One asteroid and comet mission, the use of rule-based systems by tens of thousands of Americans in the preparation of their yearly income taxes and the use of natural language technology in numerous applications including web search engines and the world's most successful word processing software. Despite these successes, the intellectual mission of understanding the nature of cognition remains one of the great challenges in modern science.
The overall goal of this work is to develop scientific guidelines that will steer research in AI over the next several decades. The symposium will also help raise awareness by students and others both of the achievements to date of the AI field, and the exciting scientific challenges that still remain. Artificial intelligence technologies have been applied in a wide range of disciplines and are often at the core of interdisciplinary efforts in bioinformatics and ecoinformatics, efforts in genomics and elsewhere using robotic technologies, the advancement of database integration and semantic web activities in the homeland defense arena and elsewhere, and in a number of other fields where the need to manage or coordinate knowledge is crucial to success. Helping other scientists to understand the contributions of AI to date, and the potential for the future, can be expected to lead to further indisciplinary work and the greater application of AI techniques in the other sciences, as well as in priority areas such as e-commerce and homeland security.
