Letter from the chair

a meeting I had been looking forward to all year with great anticipation: not only would it be my first visit to Hong Kong, but it would also be a chance to meet firsthand many additional members of the agent research community in that part of the world. I was not disappointed. It was especially impressive to see the number of students doing research who were able to attend. It made me think about the value of having meetings of this sort in various parts of the world, in addition to the major international conferences, giving more of us a chance to present our work and to connect with other researchers than would be possible otherwise. I discussed the idea of helping to facilitate new meetings in different areas of the world with several people at the meeting and got a positive enough response that I thought it would be worth talking about more widely. Jörg Müller and I would appreciate hearing from any of you who would be interested in helping to organize regional conferences or workshops on AI-related topics, especially if you live outside of the United States and western Europe. SIGART is well-equipped to help you make such events happen with a minimum of hassles. It was great to start the new millennium by attending Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI) 2000 in New Orleans. Fortunately, given the relative quiet that attended the debut of the year 2000, the program committee had already nixed the suggestion that an expert be invited to speak about any Y2K disasters that had occurred during the previous week. Instead we saw the an excellent collection of technical presentations, along with a talk on " The Emotion Machine " by Marvin Minsky and " Artists Augmented by Agents " by Ernest Edmonds. My personal thanks for a great meeting to Doug Riecken, David Benyon, Henry Lieberman and the rest of the organizing and program committee. Next year' s meeting will be held in Santa Fe, New Mexico in January. Watch for details on http://www.iuicong.org in the coming months. Also, don't forget Finally, I had a very interesting email forwarded to me recently from Alisa Rivkin of ACM. It read: " On your SIGs page you mention SIGART However, that Web-site is awfully outdated. Can you please tell me if SIGART is still active? And if not, what its replacement is? " To our friend …