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...

This study investigated the snowstorm impact on Wisconsin state highway system and assessed the winter maintenance effort in improving highway safety from a macroscopic perspective. Though the inverse relationship between the de-icing material consumption and the crash counts during the snowstorms is not reflected in the analysis, it implies that causes of snowstorm crashes are multifold. The f...

Seasonal characteristics of aerosol optical properties in Sky Radiometer Network (SKYNET) Hefei site are studied using a sky radiometer from March 2007 to May 2013. The aerosol optical depth (AOD), Angstrom exponent (AE), volume size distributions, single-scattering albedo (SSA), refractive index, and asymmetry factor (ASY) of aerosols are simultaneously retrieved using the SKYRAD.pack version ...

WINTER 2015 5 As George Bernard Shaw once observed, being slandered is better than being ignored. So maybe AI researchers should be happy about what’s been happening lately. After decades of pundits and philosophers arguing that AI is provably impossible, suddenly that argument has been replaced with the assertion that not only is it possible, but superhuman AI is so inevitable that it is the g...

[1] We examine the differences between observed stratospheric vertical wave reflection and wave absorption events, which differ in that the wave-induced deceleration remains confined to upper levels in the former. The two types of events signify two types of stratospheric winter dynamics, associated with different downward coupling to the troposphere. Using time-lagged composites, we find that ...

This paperpresents a new approach for consistently caching dynamic Web data in order to improve performance. Our algorithm, which we call Data Update Propagation (DUP), maintains data dependence information between cached objects and the underlying data which affect their values in a graph. When the system becomes aware of a change to underlying data, graph traversal algorithms are applied to d...

Weeds are commonly found in bermudagrass turf during the winter and early spring throughout the Southeastern United States whether this turf is used for lawns, parks, athletic fields or golf courses. Mild winter temperatures favor rapid growth of these annuals. When bermudagrass goes dormant in the fall after the first killing frost, it does not compete with germinating winter weeds. Bermudagra...

Capsule The wintering area of the nominate subspecies of Lesser Black-backed Gull Larus fuscus fuscus is from Ethiopia across Uganda and the Congo basin to the Atlantic, while L. f. intermedius and L. f. graellsii winters in westernmost Africa. Aims To clarify the wintering distributions of the subspecies of Lesser Black-backed Gull. Methods We compiled, mapped, and analyzed available data on r...

The word “pumpkin” is derived from the Latin word pepo, which is a botanical term for fruit with a hard rind and fleshy interior. The commonly used scientific name for pumpkins is Cucurbita pepo. But some other cucurbits, such as Cucurbita moschata (e.g., ‘Dickenson’ and ‘Libby Select’, known as processing pumpkin) (Figure 1, B) and Cucurbita maxima, which are winter squash, are also known as p...

The various precipitation types formed within winter storms (such as snow, wet snow and freezing rain) often lead to very hazardous weather conditions. These types of precipitation often occur during the passage of a warm front as a warm air mass ascends over a cold air mass. To address this issue further, we used a one-dimensional kinematic cloud model to simulate this gentle ascent (≤10 cm/s)...