ECAI 2006 was really excellent. We spent a week with lively discussions, very many good talks, lots of new ideas and a refreshing new and young AI scene - not to mention the sun and lake-side atmosphere. Thanks to the organizers and chairs, specifically Anna Perini, Paolo Traverso, Gerd Brewka and all the numerous others who helped in creating such a successful event. Special thanks goes to Silvia Coradeschi. As a conference chair she guided the whole conference and moderated a lively week in Trentino. After six years of hard work in the ECCAI board she leaves together with Uli Furbach the board. Many thanks to them for their long term engagement in all activities of ECCAI.

Werner Horn, ECCAI Chair

ECCAI conferences

ECAI-06: 17th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence - including PAIS 2006: Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems - August 29- September 1, 2006, Riva del Garda, Italy

ECAI-06 in Riva was very successful and we congratulate all those involved in organising it for an excellent job. The 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. With more than 800 participants, ECAI-06 was very good: Excellent organization, interesting invited talks, impressive participation to the 31 workshops and the 4 tutorials, high percentage of registered students (41%) . Photos can be seen on the ecai-06 web page.

IJCAI-07:

Twentieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
6-12 January, 2007 Hyderabad, India www.ijcai-07.org
Theme: Artificial Intelligence and Its Benefits to Society…
Conference Chair: Ramon Lopez de Mantaras

ECCAI Fellows

11 new ECCAI fellows were selected. Welcome to all of them!
Grigorios Antoniou, Greece - FORTH
Christian Bessiere, France - LIRMM, CNRS
Patrick Doherty, Sweden - Linköping University
Tom Eiter, Austria - Technical University of Vienna
Floriana Esposito, Italy - University of Bari
Malik Ghallab, France - LAAS-CNRS
Lluís Godo, Spain - Spanish Scientific Research Council (CSIC)
András Lörincz, Hungary - Eötvös Loránd University
Sebastian Thrun, Germany - Stanford University
Gerhard Widmer, Austria - Johannes Kepler University

See the total list of ECCAI fellows

ECCAI General Assembly

ECCAI held its annual General Assembly during ECAI-06 where a number of significant decisions were made. These are summarised below:

The President's Report 2006 is on the ECCAI website
the new ECCAI board
- Werner Horn, Austria, Chair
- Hendrick Blockeel, Belgium, Treasurer
- Ulisse Cortès, Spain, Vice-chair
- Gerhard Brewka, Germany
- Paolo Traverso, Italy
- Marie-Odile Cordier, France

ACAI-07 Summer school

The next ACAI summer shool will be held in August, 20-28, in Leuwen (Belgium) on “Logic for AI”.
It will be hosted by the Laboratory for declarative languages and artificial intelligence (DTAI / Katholieke Universiteit Leuven).

ECAI -08 in Patras (Greece)

More details in the next bulletin, have a look on the http://www.ece.upatras.gr/ecai2008 website.

ECAI-10 in Lisbon (Portugal)

More details in the next bulletin

ECCAI Journals

- IEEE Intelligent systems http://www.computer.org/intelligent/

July/August 2006, Machine Ethics cover image

Machine-ethics research might be the key to alleviating people's fears concerning machine intelligence and will likely advance our thinking about ethical theory. This special issue features articles that argue for, and begin to develop, machine ethics from both philosophical and AI perspectives.
Also in this issue: AI's semantic future, human-inspired robots, and more

- Artificial Intelligence Communications:

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

Bulletin #4, September 2006

Editorial