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cians concerned with using logical tools in philosophy have been keenly aware of the limitations that arise from the original con­ centration of symbolic logic on the idiom of mathematics, and many of them have worked to create extensions of the received logical theories that would make them more generally applicable in philosophy. Carnap's Testability and Meaning, published in 1936 and 1937, was a good early example of this sort of research, motivated by the inadequacy of first-order formalizations of dis­'This sugar cube is soluble in water'. positional sentences like And in fact there is a continuous history of work on this topic, extending from Carnap's paper to Shoham's contribution to the present volume.. Much of the work in philosophical logic, and much of what has appeared in The Journal of Philosophical Logic, was mo­ tivated by similar considerations: work in modal logic (includ­ ing tense, deontic, and epistemic logic), intensional logics, non­ declaratives, presuppositions, and many other topics. In this sort of research, sin.ce the main point is to devise new formalisms, the technical development tends to be rather shallow in comparison with mathematical logic, though it is sel­ dom absent: theorems need to be proved in order to justify the formalisms, and sometimes these are nontrivial. On the other hand, much effort has to go into motivating a logical innovation.

This book provides an understanding of the concepts and objectives of expert systems. It is a practical guide, intended to help the practitioner in identifying potential application in his/her own practice, and to understand the limitations of the technology. This should provide the auditor with a ground basis to direct, stimulate and control development efforts in his own practice. At the same time, it should give students in auditing a good grasp of the possibilities and limitations of the technology.

Advanced Topics in Shannon Sampling and Interpolation Theory is the second volume of a textbook on signal analysis solely devoted to the topic of sampling and restoration of continuous time signals and images. Sampling and reconstruction are fundamental problems in any field that deals with real-time signals or images, including communication engineering, image processing, seismology, speech recognition, and digital signal processing. This second volume includes contributions from leading researchers in the field on such topics as Gabor's signal expansion, sampling in optical image formation, linear prediction theory, polar and spiral sampling theory, interpolation from nonuniform samples, an extension of Papoulis's generalized sampling expansion to higher dimensions, and applications of sampling theory to optics and to time-frequency representations. The exhaustive bibliography on Shannon sampling theory will make this an invaluable research tool as well as an excellent text for students planning further research in the field.

How science fiction's most famous computer has influenced the research and design of intelligent machines.I became operational... in Urbana, Illinois, on January 12, 1997.Inspired by HAL's self-proclaimed birth date, HAL's Legacy reflects upon science fiction's most famous computer and explores the relationship between science fantasy and technological fact. The informative, nontechnical chapters written especially for this book describe many of the areas of computer science critical to the design of intelligent machines, discuss whether scientists in the 1960s were accurate about the prospects for advancement in their fields, and look at how HAL has influenced scientific research.Contributions by leading scientists look at the technologies that would be critical if we were, as Arthur Clarke and Stanley Kubrick imagined thirty years ago, to try and build HAL in 1997: supercomputers, fault-tolerance and reliability, planning, artificial intelligence, lipreading, speech recognition and synthesis, commonsense reasoning, the ability to recognize and display emotion, and human-machine interaction. A separate chapter by philosopher Daniel Dennett considers the ethical implications of intelligent machines.

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Since its first volume in 1960, Advances in Computers has presented detailed coverage of innovations in hardware and software and in computer theory, design, and applications. It has also provided contributors with a medium in which they can examine their subjects in greater depth and breadth than that allowed by standard journal articles. As a result, many articles have become standard references that continue to be of significant, lasting value despite the rapid growth taking place in the field.Volume 47 contains seven chapters. The first four cover artificial intelligence, which is the use of technology to perform tasks generally assumed to require human thinking. These chapters present natural language processing, visualization, and self-replication as machine implementations of human activities. The remaining three chapters cover other recent advances that are important to the information processing field.

Kim Marriott Bernd Meyer Communication is one of the hallmarks of humans. When we think of hu­ man communication, most people first think of spoken and written lan­ guages. These are similar in that symbols in the language are encountered and processed sequentially, either temporally as they are spoken or as char­ acters are read across a page. However, not all human communication is sequential in nature. Important components of human communication are visual languages, such as maps or diagrams. In these languages the basic symbols are not encountered sequentially but rather seen together at a glance. Visual languages are ubiquitous in human cultures, ranging from tradi­ tional paintings of central Australian aborigines which are, in part, maps of the countryside to an architect's design of a new building. Visual languages have been employed from earliest pre-history to the present and are used in almost every human endeavor. They cover the entire spectrum of human expression ranging from fine art, such as an abstract expressionist's private language, to precise technical communication using rigorously defined no­ tation, such as musical notation, mathematical notation, or street maps. Some visual languages, such as sign languages used by the deaf community, substitute spoken language entirely. Indeed, sign languages, for example American Sign Language, are a particularly interesting instance of visual communication, since they use three-dimensional spatial arrangements of signs in combination with their sequential temporal order to constitute meaning.

In 1996 the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) establ- hed its rst Technical Committee on foundations of computer science, TC1. The aim of IFIP TC1 is to support the development of theoretical computer science as a fundamental science and to promote the exploration of fundamental c- cepts, models, theories, and formal systems in order to understand laws, limits, and possibilities of information processing. This volume constitutes the proceedings of the rst IFIP International C- ference on Theoretical Computer Science (IFIP TCS 2000) { Exploring New Frontiers of Theoretical Informatics { organized by IFIP TC1, held at Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan in August 2000. The IFIP TCS 2000 technical program consists of invited talks, contributed talks, and a panel discussion. In conjunction with this program there are two special open lectures by Professors Jan van Leeuwen and Peter D. Mosses. The decision to hold this conference was made by IFIP TC1 in August 1998, and since then IFIP TCS 2000 has bene ted from the e orts of many people; in particular, the TC1 members and the members of the Steering Committee, the Program Committee, and the Organizing Committee of the conference. Our special thanks go to the Program Committee Co-chairs: Track (1): Jan van Leeuwen (U. Utrecht), Osamu Watanabe (Tokyo Inst. Tech.) Track (2): Masami Hagiya (U. Tokyo), Peter D. Mosses (U. Aarhus).

The theory of finite automata on finite stings, infinite strings, and trees has had a dis­ tinguished history. First, automata were introduced to represent idealized switching circuits augmented by unit delays. This was the period of Shannon, McCullouch and Pitts, and Howard Aiken, ending about 1950. Then in the 1950s there was the work of Kleene on representable events, of Myhill and Nerode on finite coset congruence relations on strings, of Rabin and Scott on power set automata. In the 1960s, there was the work of Btichi on automata on infinite strings and the second order theory of one successor, then Rabin's 1968 result on automata on infinite trees and the second order theory of two successors. The latter was a mystery until the introduction of forgetful determinacy games by Gurevich and Harrington in 1982. Each of these developments has successful and prospective applications in computer science. They should all be part of every computer scientist's toolbox. Suppose that we take a computer scientist's point of view. One can think of finite automata as the mathematical representation of programs that run us­ ing fixed finite resources. Then Btichi's SIS can be thought of as a theory of programs which run forever (like operating systems or banking systems) and are deterministic. Finally, Rabin's S2S is a theory of programs which run forever and are nondeterministic. Indeed many questions of verification can be decided in the decidable theories of these automata.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 27th International Workshop on Graph-Theoretic Concepts in Computer Science, WG 2001, held in Boltenhagen, Germany, in June 2001.The 27 revised full papers presented together with two invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers provide a wealth of new results for various classes of graphs, graph computations, graph algorithms and graph-theoretical applications in various fields.

Model checking is a powerful approach for the formal verification of software. When applicable, it automatically provides complete proofs of correctness, or explains, via counter-examples, why a system is not correct.This book provides a basic introduction to this new technique. The first part describes in simple terms the theoretical basis of model checking: transition systems as a formal model of systems, temporal logic as a formal language for behavioral properties, and model-checking algorithms. The second part explains how to write rich and structured temporal logic specifications in practice, while the third part surveys some of the major model checkers available.

Collision-Based Computing presents a unique overview of computation with mobile self-localized patterns in non-linear media, including computation in optical media, mathematical models of massively parallel computers, and molecular systems. It covers such diverse subjects as conservative computation in billiard ball models and its cellular-automaton analogues, implementation of computing devices in lattice gases, Conway's Game of Life and discrete excitable media, theory of particle machines, computation with solitons, logic of ballistic computing, phenomenology of computation, and self-replicating universal computers. Collision-Based Computing will be of interest to researchers working on relevant topics in Computing Science, Mathematical Physics and Engineering. It will also be useful background reading for postgraduate courses such as Optical Computing, Nature-Inspired Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Smart Engineering Systems, Complex and Adaptive Systems, Parallel Computation, Applied Mathematics and Computational Physics.

A new computationalist view of the mind that takes into account real-world issues of embodiment, interaction, physical implementation, and semantics.Classical computationalism—-the view that mental states are computational states—-has come under attack in recent years. Critics claim that in defining computation solely in abstract, syntactic terms, computationalism neglects the real-time, embodied, real-world constraints with which cognitive systems must cope. Instead of abandoning computationalism altogether, however, some researchers are reconsidering it, recognizing that real-world computers, like minds, must deal with issues of embodiment, interaction, physical implementation, and semantics. This book lays the foundation for a successor notion of computationalism. It covers a broad intellectual range, discussing historic developments of the notions of computation and mechanism in the computationalist model, the role of Turing machines and computational practice in artificial intelligence research, different views of computation and their role in the computational theory of mind, the nature of intentionality, and the origin of language.

This volume contains the proceedings of SARA 2000, the fourth Symposium on Abstraction, Reformulations, and Approximation (SARA). The conference was held at Horseshoe Bay Resort and Conference Club, Lake LBJ, Texas, July 26– 29, 2000, just prior to the AAAI 2000 conference in Austin. Previous SARA conferences took place at Jackson Hole in Wyoming (1994), Ville d'Est´erel in Qu´ebec (1995), and Asilomar in California (1998). The symposium grewout of a series of workshops on abstraction, approximation, and reformulation that had taken place alongside AAAI since 1989. This year's symposium was actually scheduled to take place at Lago Vista Clubs & Resort on Lake Travis but, due to the resort's failure to pay taxes, the conference had to be moved late in the day. This mischance engendered eleventh-hour reformulations, abstractions, and resource re-allocations of its own. Such are the perils of organizing a conference. This is the?rst SARA for which the proceedings have been published in the LNAI series of Springer-Verlag. We hope that this is a re?ection of the increased maturity of the?eld and that the increased visibility brought by the publication of this volume will help the discipline grow even further. Abstractions, reformulations, and approximations (AR&A) have found - plications in a variety of disciplines and problems including automatic progr- ming, constraint satisfaction, design, diagnosis, machine learning, planning, qu- itative reasoning, scheduling, resource allocation, and theorem proving. The - pers in this volume capture a cross-section of these application domains.

It has been recognized since the inception of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that abstractions, problem reformulations, and approximations (AR&A) are central to human common sense reasoning and problem solving and to the ability of systems to reason effectively in complex domains. AR&A techniques have been used to solve a variety of tasks, including automatic programming, constraint satisfaction, design, diagnosis, machine learning, search, planning, reasoning, game playing, scheduling, and theorem proving. The primary purpose of AR&A techniques in such settings is to overcome computational intractability. In addition, AR&A techniques are useful for accelerating learning and for summarizing sets of solutions. This volume contains the proceedings of SARA 2002, the fifth Symposium on Abstraction, Reformulation, and Approximation, held at Kananaskis Mountain Lodge, Kananaskis Village, Alberta (Canada), August 2 4, 2002. The SARA series is the continuation of two separate threads of workshops: AAAI workshops in 1990 and 1992, and an ad hoc series beginning with the'Knowledge Compilation'workshop in 1986 and the'Change of Representation and Inductive Bias'workshop in 1988 with followup workshops in 1990 and 1992. The two workshop series merged in 1994 to form the first SARA. Subsequent SARAs were held in 1995, 1998, and 2000.

The past few years have witnessed rapid scienti?c and technological devel- ments in human-centered, seamless computing environments, interfaces, de- ces, and systems with applications ranging from business and communication to entertainment and learning. These developments are collectively best charac- rized as Active Media Technology (AMT), a new area of information technology and computer science that emphasizes the proactive, seamless roles of interfaces and systems as well as new digital media in all aspects of human life. This - lume contains the papers presented at the Sixth International Computer Science Conference: Active Media Technology (AMT 2001), the?rst conference of its kind, capturing the state of research and development in AMT and the latest architectures, prototypes, tools, and?elded systems that demonstrate or enable AMT. The volume is organized into the following eight parts: I. Smart Digital - dia; II. Web Personalization; III. Active Interfaces; IV. Autonomous Agent - proaches; V. Facial Image Processing; VI. AMT-Supported Commerce, Business, Learning, and Health Care; VII. Tools and Techniques; and VIII. Algorithms.

Adaptive Agents and Multi-Agent Systems is an emerging and exciting interdisciplinary area of research and development involving artificial intelligence, computer science, software engineering, and developmental biology, as well as cognitive and social science. This book surveys the state of the art in this emerging field by drawing together thoroughly selected reviewed papers from two related workshops; as well as papers by leading researchers specifically solicited for this book. The articles are organized into topical sections on - learning, cooperation, and communication - emergence and evolution in multi-agent systems - theoretical foundations of adaptive agents

Machine Learning has become a key enabling technology for many engineering applications and theoretical problems alike. To further discussions and to dis- minate new results, a Summer School was held on February 11–22, 2002 at the Australian National University. The current book contains a collection of the main talks held during those two weeks in February, presented as tutorial chapters on topics such as Boosting, Data Mining, Kernel Methods, Logic, Reinforcement Learning, and Statistical Learning Theory. The papers provide an in-depth overview of these exciting new areas, contain a large set of references, and thereby provide the interested reader with further information to start or to pursue his own research in these directions. Complementary to the book, a recorded video of the presentations during the Summer School can be obtained at http://mlg. anu. edu. au/summer2002 It is our hope that graduate students, lecturers, and researchers alike will?nd this book useful in learning and teaching Machine Learning, thereby continuing the mission of the Summer School. Canberra, November 2002 Shahar Mendelson Alexander Smola Research School of Information Sciences and Engineering, The Australian National University Thanks and Acknowledgments We gratefully thank all the individuals and organizations responsible for the success of the workshop.

The 8th Ibero-American Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IBERAMIA 2002, took place in Spain for the second time in 14 years; the first conference was organized in Barcelona in January 1988. The city of Seville hosted this 8th conference, giving the participants the opportunity of enjoying the richness of its historical and cultural atmosphere. Looking back over these 14 years, key aspects of the conference, such as its structure, organization, the quantity and quality of submissions, the publication policy, and the number of attendants, have significantly changed. Some data taken from IBERAMIA'88 and IBERAMIA 2002 may help to illustrate these changes. IBERAMIA'88 was planned as an initiative of three Ibero-American AI associations: the Spanish Association for AI (AEPIA), the Mexican Association for AI (SMIA), and the Portuguese Association for AI (APIA). The conference was organized by the AEPIA staff, including the AEPIA president, José Cuena, the secretary, Felisa Verdejo, and other members of the AEPIA board. The proceedings of IBERAMIA'88 contain 22 full papers grouped into six areas: knowledge representation and reasoning, learning, AI tools, expert systems, language, and vision. Papers were written in the native languages of the participants: Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan. Twenty extended abstracts describing ongoing projects were also included in the proceedings.

Why is the question of the di?erence between living and non-living matter - tellectually so attractive to the man of the West? Where are our dreams about our own ability to understand this di?erence and to overcome it using the?rmly established technologies rooted? Where are, for instance, the cultural roots of the enterprises covered nowadays by the discipline of Arti?cial Life? Cont- plating such questions, one of us has recognized [6] the existence of the eternal dream of the man of the West expressed, for example, in the Old Testament as follows:... the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being (Genesis, 2. 7). This is the dream about the workmanlike act of the creation of Adam from clay, about the creation of life from something non-living, and the con?dence in the magic power of technologies. How has this dream developed and been converted into a reality, and how does it determine our present-day activities in science and technology? What is this con?dence rooted in? Then God said: “Let us make man in our image... ” (Genesis, 1. 26). Man believes in his own ability to repeat the Creator's acts, to change ideas into real things, because he believes he is godlike. This con?dence is – using the trendy Dawkins'term – perhaps the most important cultural meme of the West.

The Asian Computing Science Conference (ASIAN) series was initiated in 1995 to provide a forum for researchers in computer science in Asia to meet and to promote interaction with researchers from other regions. The previous?ve conferences were held, respectively, in Bangkok, Singapore, Kathmandu, Manila, and Phuket. The proceedings were published in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science Series of Springer-Verlag. This year's conference (ASIAN2000) attracted 61 submissions from which 18 papers were selected through an electronic program committee (PC) meeting. The themes for this year's conference are: – Logics in Computer Science – Data Mining – Networks and Performance The key note speaker for ASIAN2000 is Jean Vuillemin (ENS, France) and the invited speakers are Ramamohanarao Kotagiri (U. Melbourne, Australia) and Alain Jean-Marie (LIRMM, France). We thank them for accepting our - vitation. This year's conference is sponsored by the Asian Institute of Technology (Thailand), INRIA (France), the National University of Singapore (Singapore), and UNU/IIST (Macau SAR, China). We thank all these institutions for their continued support of the ASIAN series. This year's conference will be held in Penang, Malaysia. We are much obliged to Universiti Sains Malaysia and Penang State Government for providing the conference venue and to Dr. Abdullah Zawawi Haji Talib for making the local arrangements. We also wish to thank the PC members and the large number of referees for thesubstantialworkputinbytheminassessingthesubmittedpapers.

This volume contains the proceedings of the Second International Conference on Advances in Information Systems (ADVIS) held in Izmir, Turkey, 23–25 October 2002. This conference was dedicated to the memory of Prof. Esen Ozkarahan. He was a great researcher who made an essential contribution to the development of information systems. Prof. Ozkarahan was one of the pioneers of database machine research and database systems in Turkey. This conference was organized by the Computer Engineering department of Dokuz Eylul University in Izmir. This department was established in 1994 by Prof. Ozkarahan and he worked there for the last?ve years of his life. The main goal of the conference was to bring together researchers from all around the world working in di?erent areas of information systems, to share new ideas and present their latest results. This time we received 94 submissions from 27 countries. The program committee selected 40 papers for presentation at the conference. During the conference a workshop was organized on the topic “New Information Technologies in Education”. The invited and accepted cont- butions cover a large variety of topics: general aspects of information systems, databases and data warehouses, information retrieval, multiagent systems and technologies, distributed and parallel computing, evolutionary algorithms and system programming, and new information technologies in education. The success of the conference was dependent upon the hard work of a large number of people. We gratefully acknowledge the members of the Program C- mittee who helped to coordinate the process of refereeing all submitted papers.

Learning classi er systems are rule-based systems that exploit evolutionary c- putation and reinforcement learning to solve di cult problems. They were - troduced in 1978 by John H. Holland, the father of genetic algorithms, and since then they have been applied to domains as diverse as autonomous robotics, trading agents, and data mining. At the Second International Workshop on Learning Classi er Systems (IWLCS 99), held July 13, 1999, in Orlando, Florida, active researchers reported on the then current state of learning classi er system research and highlighted some of the most promising research directions. The most interesting contri- tions to the meeting are included in the book Learning Classi er Systems: From Foundations to Applications, published as LNAI 1813 by Springer-Verlag. The following year, the Third International Workshop on Learning Classi er Systems (IWLCS 2000), held September 15{16 in Paris, gave participants the opportunity to discuss further advances in learning classi er systems. We have included in this volume revised and extended versions of thirteen of the papers presented at the workshop.

In recent years, autonomous robots, including Xavier, Martha [1], Rhino [2,3], Minerva,and Remote Agent, have shown impressive performance in long-term demonstrations. In NASA's Deep Space program, for example, an - tonomous spacecraft controller, called the Remote Agent [5], has autonomously performed a scienti?c experiment in space. At Carnegie Mellon University, Xavier [6], another autonomous mobile robot, navigated through an o?ce - vironment for more than a year, allowing people to issue navigation commands and monitor their execution via the Internet. In 1998, Minerva [7] acted for 13 days as a museum tourguide in the Smithsonian Museum, and led several thousand people through an exhibition. These autonomous robots have in common that they rely on plan-based c- trol in order to achieve better problem-solving competence. In the plan-based approach, robots generate control actions by maintaining and executing a plan that is e?ective and has a high expected utility with respect to the robots'c- rent goals and beliefs. Plans are robot control programs that a robot can not only execute but also reason about and manipulate [4]. Thus, a plan-based c- troller is able to manage and adapt the robot's intended course of action — the plan — while executing it and can thereby better achieve complex and changing tasks.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases, SSTD 2003, held at Santorini Island, Greece in July 2003. The 28 revised full papers presented together with a keynote paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 105 submissions. the papers are organized in topical sections on access methods, advanced query processing, data mining and data warehousing, distance-based queries, mobility and moving points management, modeling and languages, similarity processing, systems and implementation issues.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Web-Age Information Management, WAIM 2002 held in Beijing, China in August 2002.The 40 papers presented together with two system demonstrations were carefully reviewed and selected from 169 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on XML; spatio-temporal databases; data mining and learning; XML and web; workflows and e-services; bio informatics, views, and OLAP; clustering and high-dimensional data; web search; optimization and updates; and transactions and multimedia.

We are pleased to present the proceedings of the 2003 Atlantic Web Intelligence C- ference, AWIC 2003. The conference was located in Madrid, Spain during May 5–6, 2003, organized locally by the Technical University of Madrid. AWIC 2003 aimed to be the rst of a series of conferences on Web Intelligence, to be celebrated annually, alternatively in Europe and America, starting in Madrid. It was born as an activity of the recently created WIC-Poland Research Centre and the WIC-Spain Research Centre, bothbelongingtotheWebIntelligenceConsortium(WIC) (http://wi-consortium.org).AWIC 2003 was supported with grants from the S- nish Ministry for Science and Technology and the European Network of Excellence in Knowledge Discovery, KDNet. AWIC 2003 brought together scientists, engineers, computer users, and students to exchange and share their experiences, new ideas, and research results about all aspects (theory,applications,andtools)ofarti cialintelligencetechniquesappliedtoWeb-based systems, and to discuss the practical challenges encountered and the solutions adopted. Almost 70 contributions were submitted. After a preliminary evaluation, 60 of these papers were accepted to the conference and were assigned at least two reviewers from the international program committee. Out of this 60, 33 were conditionally accepted, and 32 of them were nally accepted after the conditions set by the reviewers had been met, which resulted in an acceptance ratio of 45%.

Electronic Commerce, as a gamut of activities involving electronic transactions performed over a network via software that may be more or less autonomous, is an emerging reality. Strategic studies have shown that electronic commerce is a major growth industry. The book is devoted to the challenges and opportunities that electronic commerce opens for agent technology. For some time, electronic commerce has attracted the avid attention of agent-builders and agent technology researchers, and these have decisively contributed to advancing the state of the art in the field. The second-generation software agents now entering the scene hold great promise for the further advancement of electronic commerce. This book originates from a workshop on Agent-Mediated Electronic Trading held at Agents'98 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in May 1998. The eleven carefully reviewed and revised papers present a unique survey of software agents in the context of electronic commerce.

In this book we present a collection of papers around the topic of Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce. Most of the papers originate from the third workshop on Agent{Mediated Electronic Commerce held in conjunction with the Autonomous Agents conference in June 2000. After two previous workshops, one during the Autonomous Agents conference in 1998 in Minneapolis and the second one in conjunction with the International Joint Conference On Arti cial Intelligence in 1999, this workshop continued the tradition of the previous ones by setting the scene for the assessment of the challenges that Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce faces as well as the opportunities it creates. By focusing on age- mediated interactions, specialists from di erent disciplines were brought together who contribute theoretical and application perspectives in the narrowly focused topic that nevertheless involves wide ranging concerns such as: agent architec- res, institutionalization, economic theory, modeling, legal frameworks and policy guidelines. The main topics for the workshop were: { Electronic negotiation models for agents { Formal issues for agents that operate in electronic market places { Virtual trading institutions and platforms { Trading strategies for interrelated transactions (respectively auctions) The workshop received 12 submissions of which 7 were selected for publication in this volume. Although the number of submissions was less then expected for an important area like agent-mediated electronic commerce there is no reason to worry that this area does not get enough attention from the agent community.

One of the most important reasons for the current intensity of interest in agent technology is that the concept of an agent, as an autonomous system capable of interacting with other agents in order to satisfy its design objectives, is a natural one for software designers. Just as we can understand many systems as being composed of essentially passive objects, which have a state and upon which we can perform operations, so we can understand many others as being made up of interacting semi-autonomous agents. This book brings together revised versions of papers presented at the First International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, AOSE 2000, held in Limerick, Ireland, in conjunction with ICSE 2000, and several invited papers. As a comprehensive and competent overview of agent-oriented software engineering, the book addresses software engineers interested in the new paradigm and technology as well as research and development professionals active in agent technology.

Since the 1980s, software agents and multi-agent systems have grown into what is now one of the most active areas of research and development activity in computing generally. One of the most important reasons for the current intensity of interest in the agent-based computing paradigm certainly is that the concept of an agent as an autonomous system, capable of interacting with other agents in order to satisfy its design objectives, is a natural one for software designers. This recognition has led to the growth of interest in agents as a new paradigm for software engineering.This book reflects the state of the art in the field by presenting 14 revised full papers accepted for the second workshop on this topic, AOSE 2001, together with five invited survey articles. The book offers topical sections on societies and organizations, protocols and interaction frameworks, UML and agent systems, agent-oriented requirements capture and specification, and analysis and design.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th Congress of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence, AI•IA 2003, held in Pisa, Italy in September 2003. The 44 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 91 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on knowledge representation and reasoning, soft computing, machine learning, data mining, intelligent agents, planning, robotics, natural language processing, and applications in various fields.

AMAST's goal is to advance awareness of algebraic and logical methodology as part of the fundamental basis of software technology. Ten years and seven conferences after the start of the AMAST movement, I believe we are attaining this. The movement has propagated throughout the world, assembling many enthusiastic specialists who have participated not only in the conferences, which are now annual, but also in the innumerable other activities that AMAST promotes and supports. We are now facing the Seventh International Conference on Algebraic Methodology and Software Technology (AMAST'98). The previous meetings were held in Iowa City, USA (1989 and 1991), in Enschede, The Netherlands (1993), in Montreal, Canada (1995), in Munich, Germany (1996), and in Sydney, Australia (1997). This time it is Brazil's turn, in a very special part of this colorful country – Amazonia. Thus, “if we have done more it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” The effort started by Teodor Rus, Arthur Fleck, and William A. Kirk at AMAST'89 was consolidated in AMAST'91 by Teodor Rus, Maurice Nivat, Charles Rattray, and Giuseppe Scollo. Then came modular construction of the building, wonderfully carried out by Giuseppe Scollo, Vangalur Alagar, Martin Wirsing, and Michael Johnson, as Program Chairs of the AMAST conferences held between 1993 and 1997.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Algorithm Engineering, WAE 2001, held in Aarhus, Denmark, in August 2001. The 15 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 25 submissions. Among the topics addressed are implementation, experimental testing, and fine-tuning of discrete algorithms; novel use of discrete algorithms in other disciplines; empirical research on algorithms and data structures; and methodological issues regarding the process of converting user requirements into efficient algorithmic solutions and implemenations.

This volume contains the papers presented at the 12th Annual Conference on Algorithmic Learning Theory (ALT 2001), which was held in Washington DC, USA, during November 25–28, 2001. The main objective of the conference is to provide an inter-disciplinary forum for the discussion of theoretical foundations of machine learning, as well as their relevance to practical applications. The conference was co-located with the Fourth International Conference on Discovery Science (DS 2001). The volume includes 21 contributed papers. These papers were selected by the program committee from 42 submissions based on clarity, signi?cance, o- ginality, and relevance to theory and practice of machine learning. Additionally, the volume contains the invited talks of ALT 2001 presented by Dana Angluin of Yale University, USA, Paul R. Cohen of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA, and the joint invited talk for ALT 2001 and DS 2001 presented by Setsuo Arikawa of Kyushu University, Japan. Furthermore, this volume includes abstracts of the invited talks for DS 2001 presented by Lindley Darden and Ben Shneiderman both of the University of Maryland at College Park, USA. The complete versions of these papers are published in the DS 2001 proceedings (Lecture Notes in Arti?cial Intelligence Vol. 2226).

This volume contains the papers presented at the 13th Annual Conference on Algorithmic Learning Theory (ALT 2002), which was held in Lub ¨ eck (Germany) during November 24–26, 2002. The main objective of the conference was to p- vide an interdisciplinary forum discussing the theoretical foundations of machine learning as well as their relevance to practical applications. The conference was colocated with the Fifth International Conference on Discovery Science (DS 2002). The volume includes 26 technical contributions which were selected by the program committee from 49 submissions. It also contains the ALT 2002 invited talks presented by Susumu Hayashi (Kobe University, Japan) on “Mathematics Based on Learning”, by John Shawe-Taylor (Royal Holloway University of L- don, UK) on “On the Eigenspectrum of the Gram Matrix and Its Relationship to the Operator Eigenspectrum”, and by Ian H. Witten (University of Waikato, New Zealand) on “Learning Structure from Sequences, with Applications in a Digital Library” (joint invited talk with DS 2002). Furthermore, this volume - cludes abstracts of the invited talks for DS 2002 presented by Gerhard Widmer (Austrian Research Institute for Arti?cial Intelligence, Vienna) on “In Search of the Horowitz Factor: Interim Report on a Musical Discovery Project” and by Rudolf Kruse (University of Magdeburg, Germany) on “Data Mining with Graphical Models”. The complete versions of these papers are published in the DS 2002 proceedings (Lecture Notes in Arti?cial Intelligence, Vol. 2534). ALT has been awarding the E.

This volume contains all the papers presented at the Ninth International Con- rence on Algorithmic Learning Theory (ALT'98), held at the European education centre Europ¨aisches Bildungszentrum (ebz) Otzenhausen, Germany, October 8{ 10, 1998. The Conference was sponsored by the Japanese Society for Arti cial Intelligence (JSAI) and the University of Kaiserslautern. Thirty-four papers on all aspects of algorithmic learning theory and related areas were submitted, all electronically. Twenty-six papers were accepted by the program committee based on originality, quality, and relevance to the theory of machine learning. Additionally, three invited talks presented by Akira Maruoka of Tohoku University, Arun Sharma of the University of New South Wales, and Stefan Wrobel from GMD, respectively, were featured at the conference. We would like to express our sincere gratitude to our invited speakers for sharing with us their insights on new and exciting developments in their areas of research. This conference is the ninth in a series of annual meetings established in 1990. The ALT series focuses on all areas related to algorithmic learning theory including (but not limited to): the theory of machine learning, the design and analysis of learning algorithms, computational logic of/for machine discovery, inductive inference of recursive functions and recursively enumerable languages, learning via queries, learning by arti cial and biological neural networks, pattern recognition, learning by analogy, statistical learning, Bayesian/MDL estimation, inductive logic programming, robotics, application of learning to databases, and gene analyses.

The papers in this volume were presented at the Fourth Italian Conference on Algorithms and Complexity (CIAC 2000). The conference took place on March 1-3, 2000, in Rome (Italy), at the conference center of the University of Rome \La Sapienza'. This conference was born in 1990 as a national meeting to be held every three years for Italian researchers in algorithms, data structures, complexity, and parallel and distributed computing. Due to a signi cant participation of foreign reaserchers, starting from the second conference, CIAC evolved into an international conference. In response to the call for papers for CIAC 2000, there were 41 subm- sions, from which the program committee selected 21 papers for presentation at the conference. Each paper was evaluated by at least three program committee members. In addition to the selected papers, the organizing committee invited Giorgio Ausiello, Narsingh Deo, Walter Ruzzo, and Shmuel Zaks to give plenary lectures at the conference. We wish to express our appreciation to all the authors of the submitted papers, to the program committee members and the referees, to the organizing committee, and to the plenary lecturers who accepted our invitation.