After Seventeen Years and 70 Issues

SUMMER 2016 3 In 1998, AAAI Publications committee chair Ken Ford invited me to become the Editor-in-Chief of AI Magazine. After two issues as Editor Elect, I became Editor-in-Chief in spring 1999. Now, 70 issues and 17 years later, I am still deeply grateful for the opportunity to contribute to AAAI and to the AI community through the editorship. It has been a privilege to guide the magazine’s coverage and a treat to have the first look at exciting articles as they arrive. It has been an honor and pleasure to work with all those individuals — worldwide — whose efforts have made, and continue to make the magazine a success. It has been a joy to edit this magazine. However, now that my administrative role at Indiana University has grown, I realize that the time has come for me to pass the torch and allow new leadership to build on the magazine’s many strengths. I look forward to their accomplishments in the next chapter of publishing what has been called the “journal of record for the field of artificial intelligence.” Much has changed at AI Magazine during the past 17 years. Although it seems impossible to believe today, we were still receiving paper submissions when I began my editorship. The switch to electronic submissions, while not without its difficulties, marked a major early milestone for our publication. At the beginning of my tenure, the AAAI website did not have downloadable versions of all the back issues. Today, with the aid of an electronic publications management system, we have been able to build a digital library of AAAI publications that includes every one of the tens