CBR @ IJCAI'99

The 16th. International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence was held in Stockholm Sweden from July 31st to August 6th 1999, directly following ICCBR'99 in Germany. This report does not aim to describe all of IJCAI'99, but rather just the workshops and sessions of direct relevance to CBRers.

I'd never been to Sweden before and found Stockholm to be a really beautiful city and we were blessed by excellent weather which didn't break until the final day. I think most of us spent a lot of time walking around this beautiful place and we all commented on one very striking feature....

...there are almost no cars in Stockholm. The photo opposite was taken at 5.00 pm on a weekday looking down one of Stockholm's main city centre streets (honest). There's only one car moving! London or Paris would be gridlocked at this time of day. I'm rather fond of cars (e.g., there's a picture of my sports car on my homepage) but I must say that the absence of cars makes a city centre much more pleasant, clean and quiet to live in. So, enough of the eco lecture and on with the confernce.

Visit the official IJCAI'99 web site and view the full program.

There were three events directly involving CBR at IJCAI'99:

a workshop
2 conference sessions on CBR
a session on applications in which a CBR application won a "Distinguished Paper Award"

(click to read the report on each)

IJCAI'99 was co-located with RoboCup-99 a competition involving several leagues of autonomous robots playing soccer. A well know CBRer, Manula Velloso, leads (or is it manages) CMUnited which has won in past years and did well this year. Rumours are that CMUnited use CBR as part of their strategy, but I find no evidence of this in this paper describing their robot soccer team. Regardless, Robocup was fun to watch and the matches attracted bigger audiences than most of the IJCAI sessions!