From the birth of AI, one of the central challenges of the field has been to understand and model human intelligence. The primary motivation for this workshop grows out of the belief that meeting that challenge requires not only studying many separate skills but ultimately integrating them into a coherent whole. In particular, the development of machines that collaborate and interact socially with people necessitates integration of numerous complex technologies. This integration, in turn, requires better tools and an increased focus on architecture.

Progress towards these goals is best ensured through a healthy balance between theory, tools and implementation. Indeed, the papers presented at the workshop fell roughly equally into these three categories.

Some tools presented took the form of specifications and software libraries. Examples are OpenAIR, developed by MINDMAKERS.ORG, and NetP by Hsiao et al. Both are geared towards building complex software systems, proposing methods for easier connection of programming languages and platforms. Among other tools were Thorisson's et al. whiteboards which provide semantic publish-subscribe and routing of messages and streams. List and collaborators showed how modularity can be brought to the construction of vision architectures while Vilhjalmsson and Marsella proposed common representations for enabling easy construction of multimodal dialogue planners.

Among the theoretical papers presented was a proposal by Samsonovich and Jong to use neural networks on top of symbolic representations to learn groupings and allow the system to evolve over time. Another was Arzi-Gonczarowski's ISAAC, with a special module construct that allows incremental, compositional system growth.

Many of the implemented systems presented were formiddable attempts at large-scale integration. For example, the MARCO system by MacMahon, a system for following route instructions, addresses shortcomings of the multi-component GRACE and GEORGE robots (AAAI Robot Challenge 2002). Bennewitz's et al. robot can maintain dialogue with two humans at once and Mavridis' and Roy's architecture enables a robot to interact with a user via speech, updating its beliefs about the surroundings using a range of heterogeneous perceptual inputs. Addressing somewhat different questions, Gray and Breazeal's robot runs simulations of people to infer their mental state.

There is significant potential for collaboration in the research presented. The theoretical work needs to be tested in context - some of the robot architectures, for example Mavridis', could provide that testbed. Baumer's and Tomlinson's work on synthetic social construction could quite possibly benefit from Vilhjalmsson's et al. work on social communication or Gordon's classification of cognitive architectures. Gupta and Hennacy's work on common sense reasoning provides an interesting piece to the puzzle of enabling robots to work effectively indoors. All of the work presented, especially the multi-module robot architectures, could benefit from using OpenAIR and NetP, which would simplify integration and ease module reuse.

During the AAAI conference our workshop got a nice boost 'from above': Both Marvin Minsky's keynote address and Ronald J. Brachman's presidential address emphasized integration and large-scale modeling and urged the field to set its sights on human intelligence. Practically all of the researchers in our workshop do so. We find this very exciting and hope they make real progress fast.