The Twentieth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence

early years. By all accounts, the conference succeeded in reaching that goal. Our efforts to broaden the conference while retaining its high quality got off to a rousing start with a record number of 803 submissions to the technical program. This was an 80 percent increase in submissions from recent years. We had submissions from 40 countries, with 48 percent of the submitted papers from outside the United States. Since its inception AAAI has been justifiably proud of the high quality of reviewing and technical content. We tried to cement this reputation with several novel features. In keeping with AAAI tradition, each paper received a double-blind review by the three program committee (PC) members. The assigned senior PC member then facilitated the discussion among the reviewers. A novel feature this year was the opportunity for the authors to read the reviews and provide a response of limited length. The author feedback feature seems to be a success, judging from the number of authors who took advantage of it and the amount of PC discussion the responses generated. The PC discussions resulted in accept or reject deci■ The Twentieth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence was held July 9–13, 2005, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The conference, which marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), received 803 submissions to the technical program. All papers were double-blind reviewed, and 150 papers were accepted for oral presentation, while 79 papers were accepted for poster presentation. The keynote address was delivered by Marvin Minsky.