AAAI Organization Officers AAAI President Eric Horvitz (Microsoft Corporation) AAAI President-Elect Martha E. Pollack (University of Michigan) Past President Alan Mackworth (University of British Columbia) Secretary-Treasurer Ted Senator (SAIC) Councilors (through 2008): Maria Gini (University of Minnesota) Kevin Knight (USC/Information Sciences Institute) Peter Stone (University of Texas at Austin) Sebastian Thrun (Stanford University) (through 2009): David Aha (U.S. Naval Research Laboratory) David Musliner (Honeywell Laboratories) Michael Pazzani (Rutgers University) Holly Yanco (University of Massachusetts Lowell) (through 2010): Sheila McIlraith (University of Toronto) Rich Sutton (University of Alberta) David E. Smith (NASA Ames Research Center) Cynthia Breazeal (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Standing Committees Conference Chair Yolanda Gil (USC/Information Sciences Institute) Fellows and Nominating Chair Alan Mackworth (University of British Columbia) xxvi Finance Chair Ted Senator (SAIC) Conference Outreach Chair Peter Stone (University of Texas at Austin) Membership Chair Holly Yanco (University of Massachusetts Lowell) Publications Chair David Leake (Indiana University) Symposium Chair and Associate Chair Alan C. Schultz (Naval Research Laboratory) Marjorie Skubic (University of Missouri-Columbia) Symposium Associate Chair Holly Yanco (University of Massachusetts Lowell) AAAI Press Editor-in-Chief Anthony Cohn (University of Leeds) General Manager David M. Hamilton (The Live Oak Press, LLC) Press Editorial Board Aaron Bobick (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA) Ken Forbus (Northwestern University, USA) Enrico Franconi (Free University of Bozen - Bolzano, Italy) Thomas Hofmann (Google, USA) Craig Knoblock (Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, USA) George Luger (University of New Mexico, USA) David Poole (University of British Columbia, Canada) Oliviero Stock (ITC IRST, Italy) Gerhard Widmer (Johannes Kepler University, Austria) Mary-Anne Williams (University of Technology, Sydney, Australia) AI Magazine Editor David Leake (Indiana University) Reports Editor Robert A. Morris (NASA Ames Research Center) xxvii Managing Editor David M. Hamilton (The Live Oak Press, LLC) Magazine Editorial Board Marie desJardins (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) Boi Faltings (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) Kenneth Ford (Institute for Human and Machine Cognition) Janice Glasgow (Queen’s University) Kristian Hammond (Northwestern University) Patrick Hayes (Institute for Human and Machine Cognition) Subbarao Kambhampati (Arizona State University) Henry Kautz (University of Washington) Ramon Mantaras (IIIA, Spanish Scientific Research Council) Stephen Muggleton (Imperial College) Martha Pollack (University of Michigan) Bruce Porter (University of Texas at Austin) Robert St. Amant (North Carolina State University) Barry Smyth (University College Dublin) Manuela Veloso (Carnegie Mellon University) David Vernon (Etisalat University College)) Chris Welty (IBM Research) Holly Yanco (University of Massachusetts Lowell) Feng Zhao (Microsoft Research) AAAI Staff Executive Director Carol McKenna Hamilton Finance and Office Manager Colleen Boyce Senior Conference Coordinator Keri Harvey Conference Coordinator Josette Mausisa Information Technology Manager Richard A. Skalsky Membership Coordinator Alanna Spencer AI Topics Webmaster Jon Glick Media Liaison Sara Hedberg (Emergent Inc.) xxviii Publications Director David M. Hamilton (The Live Oak Press, LLC) AAAI-08 Conference Committee AAAI Conference Committee Chair Yolanda Gil (USC/Information Sciences Institute) AAAI-08 Program Cochairs Dieter Fox (University of Washington) Carla Gomes (Cornell University) IAAI-08 Chair and Cochair Mehmet Goker (PricewaterhouseCoopers) Karen Haigh (BBN Technologies) Special Track on Artificial Intelligence and the Web Cochairs Oren Etzioni (University of Washington) Craig Knoblock (University of Southern California) Special Track on Integrated Intelligence Cochairs Pat Langley (Institute for the Study of Learning and Expertise) Alan Schultz (Naval Research Laboratory) Special Track on Physically Grounded AI Cochairs Drew Bagnell (Carnegie Mellon University) Wolfram Burgard (University of Freiburg) Irfan Essa (Georgia Institute of Technology) AAAI Nectar Papers Cochairs Sven Koenig (University of Southern California) Regina Barzilay (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Senior Member Papers Cochairs Devika Subramanian (Rice University) Benjamin Kuipers (University of Texas at Austin) Tutorial Cochairs Andrea Danyluk (Williams College) Peter Stone (University of Texas at Austin) Workshop Cochairs Simon Parsons (Brooklyn College, CUNY) Meinolf Sellmann (Brown University) Doctoral Consortium Chair Colleen van Lent (California State University Long Beach) Scott Wallace (Washington State University, Vancouver) Student Abstract and Poster Cochairs Tanzeem Choudhury (Dartmouth College) Matt Gaston (University of Maryland Baltimore County) xxix Willem van Hoeve (Carnegie Mellon University) Intelligent Systems Demonstrations Cochairs Holger Hoos (University of British Columbia) Michael Bowling (University of Alberta) Mobile Robot Exhibition and Workshop Paul Oh, Event Cochair (Drexel University) Odest Chadwicke Jenkins, Event Cochair (Brown University) Youngmoo Kim, Workshop Cochair (Drexel University) Monica Anderson, Workshop Cochair (University of Alabama) General Game Playing Competition Chairs Michael Genesereth (Stanford University) Eric Schkufza (Stanford University) Poker Competition Chair Andrew Gilpin (Carnegie Mellon University) AI Video Competition Cochairs David W. Aha (Naval Research Laboratory) Sebastian Thrun (Stanford University) Student Participation Associate Chair Julie Weber, University of Michigan AAAI-08 Senior Program Committee Chitta Baral (Arizona State University) Satinder Baveja (University of Michigan) Michael Beetz (Technische Universitaet Muenchen) Berthe Y. Choueiry (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) Mark Craven (University of Wisconsin) Tom Dean (Google Inc.) Pedro Domingos (University of Washington) Lise Getoor (University of Maryland, College Park) Amy Greenwald (Brown University) Russ Greiner (University of Alberta) Carlos Guestrin (Carnegie Mellon University) Joerg Hoffmann (SAP Research, CEC Karlsruhe) Subbarao Kambhampati (Arizona State University) Henry Kautz (University of Rochester) Richard Korf (University of California, Los Angeles) Gerhard Lakemeyer (RWTH Aachen University) Tessa Lau (IBM Almaden Research Center) Kevin Leyton-Brown (University of British Columbia) Vladimir Lifschitz (University of Texas) Bernhard Nebel (Albert-Ludwigs-Universitaet Freiburg) Peter Norvig (Google Inc.) Natasha Noy (Stanford University) Tim Oates (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) xxx Patrick Pantel (University of Southern California, Information Sciences Institute) Ronald Parr (Duke University) David Poole (University of British Columbia) Dragomir Radev (University of Michigan) Jean-Charles Régin (ILOG) Jeffrey S. Rosenschein (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Francesca Rossi (University of Padova) Dan Roth (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) Nicholas Roy (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Dale Schuurmans (University of Alberta) Bart Selman (Cornell University) Yoav Shoham (Stanford University) Milind Tambe (University of Southern California) Ben Taskar (University of Pennsylvania) Michael Thielscher (Technische Universitaet Dresden) Peter Turney (National Research Council Canada) Peter van Beek (University of Waterloo) Frank van Harmelen (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) Pascal Van Hentenryck (Brown University) Toby Walsh (NICTA and UNSW) Dan Weld (University of Washington) Michael Wooldridge (University of Liverpool) Qiang Yang (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) Shlomo Zilberstein (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) AAAI-08 Program Committee Pieter Abbeel (Stanford University) Sherief Abdallah (British University in Dubai) Douglas Aberdeen (Google Inc.) Eytan Adar (University of Washington) Aditya Agarwal (Facebook) Eugene Agichtein (Emory University) Thomas Ågotnes (Bergen University College) Gregory Aist (Arizona State University) Rachid Alami (LAAS-CNRS) Jose Alferes (CENTRIA) Alon Altman (Stanford University) Jose Luis Ambite (University of Southern California, Information Sciences Institute) Leila Amgoud (IRIT-CNRS) Eyal Amir (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) Monica Anderson (Syntience Inc.) David Andre (BodyMedia, Inc) Carlos Ansotegui (University of Lleida) Tom Armstrong (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) Itai Ashlagi (Technion) Moshe Babaioff (Microsoft Research) xxxi Tucker Balch (Georgia Institute of Technology) Marcello Balduccini (Kodak Research Labs) Timothy Baldwin (University of Melbourne) Roman Barták (Charles University) Ana Bazzan (UFRGS) Chris Beck (University of Toronto) Ramon Béjar (Universitat de Lleida) Nicolas Beldiceanu (Ecole des Mines de Nantes / LINA) Trevor Bench-Capon (University of Liverpool) Samy Bengio (Google Inc.) Belaïd Benhamou (Université de Provence Aix-Marseille1) Michael Benisch (Carnegie Mellon University) Russell Bent (Los Alamos National Laboratory) J. Benton (Arizona State University) Abraham Bernstein (University of Zurich) Dan Bernstein (self-employed) Christian Bessiere (CNRS) Bradley Best (Adaptive Cognitive Systems, LLC) Mikhail Bilenko (Microsoft Research) Misha Bilenko (Microsoft Research) Jeff Bilmes (University of Washington, Seattle) Larry Birnbaum Stefano Bistarelli (Università “G.