The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, in cooperation with Stanford University's Department of Computer Science, was pleased to present the 2009 Spring Symposium Series, held Monday through Wednesday, March 23–25, 2009 at Stanford University. The titles of the nine symposia were Agents that Learn from Human Teachers, Benchmarking of Qualitative Spatial and Temporal Reasoning Systems, Experimental Design for Real-World Systems, Human Behavior Modeling, Intelligent Event Processing, Intelligent Narrative Technologies II, Learning by Reading and Learning to Read, Social Semantic Web: Where Web 2.0 Meets Web 3.0, and Technosocial Predictive Analytics. The goal of the Agents that Learn from Human Teachers was to investigate how we can enable software and robotics agents to learn from real-time interaction with an everyday human partner. The aim of the Benchmarking of Qualitative Spatial and Temporal Reasoning Systems symposium was to initiate the development of a problem repository in the field of qualitative spatial and temporal reasoning and identify a graded set of challenges for future midterm and long-term research. The Experimental Design symposium discussed the challenges of evaluating AI systems. The Human Behavior Modeling symposium explored reasoning methods for understanding various aspects of human behavior, especially in the context of designing intelligent systems that interact with humans. The Intelligent Event Processing symposium discussed the need for more AI-based approaches in event processing and defined a kind of research agenda for the field, coined as intelligent complex event processing (iCEP). The Intelligent Narrative Technologies II AAAI symposium discussed innovations, progress, and novel techniques in the research domain. The Learning by Reading and Learning to Read symposium explored two aspects of making natural language texts semantically accessible to, and processable by, machines. The Social Semantic Web symposium focused on the real-world grand challenges in this area. Finally, the Technosocial Predictive Analytics symposium explored new methods for anticipatory analytical thinking that provide decision advantage through the integration of human and physical models.

Air transport industry has gradually increased its share of global passenger and freight traffic, and this trend has accelerated in the last 40 years. For the past decade, air-freight traffic growth has outpaced air passenger traffic growth by 1-2% each year. In the past, air-freight sector offered limited services, with heavy reliance on several intermediaries and a significant dependence on air passenger operations. The sector can now be characterized as a sophisticated, innovative one, relying heavily on new electronic technologies, offering a wide range of transport and logistical products through dedicated specialist freight operators. With increasing emphasis on the globalization of trade and economic activity, air-freight growth is expected to continue to outpace air passenger traffic growth. The air-freight growth is expected to be greatest in the Asian markets (intra-Asia; North America-Asia; Europe-Asia and Australasia). The process of physical distribution of freight has become a highly sophisticated operation, with increasingly greater reliance being placed on the use of new technology to assist in the movement, storage, and tracking of consignments. But transport is just one component in this logistics chain. In this paper, air-freight sector is examined in terms of its structure, organization, its role in the supply chains, the main trends in the recent period, constraints facing the sector and the future prospects in air-freight sector. KEY WORDS: air freight organization, development, trends, forecast, logistics services