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The Casper's internal working that provides such critical reasoning capabilities to robotic explorers is presented. The Three Corner Sat and the Autonomous Sciencecraft Constellation missions are described and the Casper's contribution to each is highlighted.

This article provides an overview of the Comirem system or Continuous, Mixed-Initiative Resource Management, an intelligent form for resource management that is designed to more directly match the iterative, user-centered nature of planning and scheduling in practical domains. Comirem implements a user-centered, mixed-initiative approach to scheduling and resource allocation in continuous planning domains. Users interact with the system through a Web-based, spreadsheet-style graphical user interface that reflects a structured-forms decision-making paradigm.

The article discusses "flexecution," or managing planning and execution amid poorly-defined or conflicting goals. The real world often presents large, sprawling problems that defy a priori categorization, and whose solutions are apt to provoke disagreement among even experienced judges. Amid this uncertainty it can be useful to consider aims and objectives as mutable and context-sensitive, prone to refinement as a process unfolds. The war in Iraq and relief efforts responding to the Sumatra earthquake and tsunami in 2006 are cited as examples.

The article focuses on the application of artificial intelligence in the future outer space explorations of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Artificial intelligence technology is believed to support decision-makings in space vehicles, particularly in detecting and tracking events of scientific interests. With onboard decision-making, the space vehicles of NASA could rapidly identify scientific explorations such as detecting planets and space environment, even if the spacecraft is at a great distance. INSET: Retrospective on 1998 Special Issue: "Autonomy in Space".

This editorial explains that the articles in this special issue of "IEEE Intelligent Systems" deal with large-scale distributed software systems with predictable dependability properties, and discuss an emerging and exciting approach to building these most challenging kinds of systems. Three main sources of change have converged to make the topic of dependable distributed systems of great current interest: the growing demand for dependability; a revolutionary change in our models of computation; and the appearance of a potential solution. The articles in this issue explore the interplay between the promises of flexible, agent-based computation and the desire for dependability guarantees.