The purpose of this question is to compile a list of major ongoing and
future thrusts of AI. To be included in this list a research problem
or application must have the following characteristics:

   [1]  Collaborative Community Effort: It must span several subfields
        of AI, requiring some degree of collaboration between AI
        researchers of different specialties. The idea is to help
        unify the fragmented subfields with a common purpose or
        purposes. 

   [2]  High Impact: It must address important problems of widespread interest.
        Solving the problem must matter to many people and not simply
        be adding another grain of sand on the anthill. This will help
        motivate and excite researchers, and justify the field to outsiders.

   [3]  Short Horizon for Progress: It must be possible to have incremental
        progress and not be an all or nothing problem. For example,
        problems where we can reasonably expect to make significant
        measurable progress over the next 10 years or so.

   [4]  Drive Basic Research: It should involve more than just
        applying current technology, but should drive basic research
        and the development of new technology (possibly in completely
        new directions). 

In short, these problems should be "Grand Challenges" for AI. If you
were trying to describe the field of AI to a layman, what concrete
problems would you use to illustrate the overall vision of the field?
Saying that the goal of AI is to produce "thinking machines that solve
problems" doesn't quite cut it.

   o  Knowbots/Infobots, Web Agents and Intelligent Help Desks
         Unified NLU, NLG, Information Retrieval, KR, Reasoning,
         Intelligent User Interfaces, Qualitative Reasoning.

   o  Autonomous Vehicles
         Unified Robotics, Machine Vision, Machine Learning,
         Intelligent Control, Planning

   o  Machine Translation
         Unified NLU, NLG, Knowledge Representation, Speech Understanding,
         Speech Synthesis 

It seems appropriate to mention, in this context, some of the early
goals of AI.  In 1958 Newell and Simon predicted that computers would
-- by 1970 -- be capable of composing classical music, discovering
important new mathematical theorems, playing chess at grandmaster
level, and understanding and translating spoken language. Although
these predictions were overly optimistic, they did represent a set of
focused goals for the field of AI. [See H. A. Simon and A. Newell,
"Heuristic Problem Solving: The Next Advance in Operations Research",
Operation Research, pages 1-10, January-February 1958.]