AAAI-07 preface

The year 2007 is a special one for AAAI, as it celebrates changing its name to the " Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. " This change is appropriate to reflect the increasing participation of AI scientists and practitioners from countries other than the USA in the AAAI association, conference, and other activities. The international nature of the conference is clearly reflected in the submissions to the AAAI-07 conference, which came from 45 countries, with 560 papers (61 percent) from outside the USA. This year we continued several innovations introduced in 2006 — the special technical tracks for integrated intelligence and artificial intelligence and the web, the senior members track, and the nectar track. Integrated intelligence papers represent research that integrates multiple component technologies (for example , reasoning, vision, speech, memory, language , planning, problem solving, learning) to produce intelligent behavior. Artificial intelligence and the web papers highlight the synergy that is common between AI and the web — the use of AI techniques to increase the capabilities of the world wide web and vice-versa. In the senior members track, senior researchers in AI offer broad perspectives on an important new research direction or a well-developed body of research, or provide a thoughtful critique of trends in the field. The new scientific and technical advances in research track (Nectar) papers expose AAAI attendees to important ideas that have been published in more specialized conferences. The conference attracted a record number of submissions this year. Overall, we received a total of 923 submissions to the main technical program, which included 116 submissions to the artificial intelligence and the web track and 46 submissions to the integrated intelligence track. Of these, 251 (27 percent) were accepted. There were also 48 submissions to the nectar track, of which 18 were accepted, and 5 submissions to the senior members track, of which 2 were accepted. This year we returned to the AAAI tradition of having all accepted papers presented orally. The poster presentation slots were reserved for a small number of exceptional papers (for example, outstanding research, ideas that were broad in scope and could benefit from a more interactive presentation, papers that might be controversial and spark discussion, and so on), as a way of highlighting these papers and adding prestige to the poster session. The reviewing process was rigorous and extensive , involving 45 senior program committee (SPC) members and 510 …