Bücher der Reihe Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence

 This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Central and European Conference on Multi-Agent Systems, CEEMAS 2003, held in Prague, Czech Republic in June 2003. The 58 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 109 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on formal methods, social knowledge and meta-reasoning, negotiation, and policies, ontologies and languages, planning, coalitions, evolution and emergent behaviour, platforms, protocols, security, real-time and synchronization, industrial applications, e-business and virtual enterprises, and Web and mobile agents.

The refereed proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty, ECSQARU 2003, held in Aalborg, Denmark in July 2003.The 47 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited survey articles were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers are organized in topical sections on foundations of uncertainty concepts, Bayesian networks, algorithms for uncertainty inference, learning, decision graphs, belief functions, fuzzy sets, possibility theory, default reasoning, belief revision and inconsistency handling, logics, and tools.

 This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Industrial and Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems, IEA/AIE 2003, held in Loughborough, UK in June 2003.The 81 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 140 submissions. Among the topics addressed are soft computing, fuzzy logic, diagnosis, knowledge representation, knowledge management, automated reasoning, machine learning, planning and scheduling, evolutionary computation, computer vision, agent systems, algorithmic learning, tutoring systems, financial analysis, etc.

This volume contains the proceedings of ICCS 2003, the 11th International C- ferenceonConceptualStructures. Thisconferenceseriescontinuestobethemain forum for the presentation and discussion of state-of-the-art research on conc- tualstructures. Thetheories,methodologies,andtechniquespresentedherehave grown considerably in scope in recent years. On the other hand, solid bridges spanning the boundaries between such diverse ?elds as Conceptual Graphs, F- mal Concept Analysis, and others are increasingly being built in our community. The theme of this year's conference was "e;Conceptual Structures for Kno- edge Creation and Communication"e;. In our increasingly (Inter)networked world, the potential support of information technology for the creation and commu- cation of quality knowledge is almost boundless. However, in reality, many c- ceptual barriers prevent the use of this potential. The main problem is no longer in the technological infrastructure, but in how to navigate, use, and manage the wealth of available data resources. Thus, the question is: how to create and communicate from data the information and ultimately the knowledge required by an ever more complex and dynamic society? Conceptual structures research focuses on what is behind and between the data glut and the information ov- load that need to be overcome in answering this question. In this way, our ?eld contributes important ideas on how to actually realize some of the many still ambitious visions. All regular papers were reviewed in a thorough and open process by at least two reviewers and one editor.

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.

The proceedings of ECML/PKDD2003 are published in two volumes: the P- ceedings of the 14th European Conference on Machine Learning (LNAI 2837) and the Proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (LNAI 2838). The two conferences were held on September 22-26, 2003 in Cavtat, a small tourist town in the vicinity of Dubrovnik, Croatia. As machine learning and knowledge discovery are two highly related ?elds, theco-locationofbothconferencesisbene?cialforbothresearchcommunities.In Cavtat, ECML and PKDD were co-located for the third time in a row, following the successful co-location of the two European conferences in Freiburg (2001) and Helsinki (2002). The co-location of ECML2003 and PKDD2003 resulted in a joint program for the two conferences, including paper presentations, invited talks, tutorials, and workshops. Out of 332 submitted papers, 40 were accepted for publication in the ECML2003proceedings,and40wereacceptedforpublicationinthePKDD2003 proceedings. All the submitted papers were reviewed by three referees. In ad- tion to submitted papers, the conference program consisted of four invited talks, four tutorials, seven workshops, two tutorials combined with a workshop, and a discovery challenge.

The proceedings of ECML/PKDD2003 are published in two volumes: the P- ceedings of the 14th European Conference on Machine Learning (LNAI 2837) and the Proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (LNAI 2838). The two conferences were held on September 22-26, 2003 in Cavtat, a small tourist town in the vicinity of Dubrovnik, Croatia. As machine learning and knowledge discovery are two highly related ?elds, theco-locationofbothconferencesisbene?cialforbothresearchcommunities.In Cavtat, ECML and PKDD were co-located for the third time in a row, following the successful co-location of the two European conferences in Freiburg (2001) and Helsinki (2002). The co-location of ECML2003 and PKDD2003 resulted in a joint program for the two conferences, including paper presentations, invited talks, tutorials, and workshops. Out of 332 submitted papers, 40 were accepted for publication in the ECML2003proceedings,and40wereacceptedforpublicationinthePKDD2003 proceedings. All the submitted papers were reviewed by three referees. In ad- tion to submitted papers, the conference program consisted of four invited talks, four tutorials, seven workshops, two tutorials combined with a workshop, and a discovery challenge.

This book presents revised versions of the lectures given at the 8th ELSNET European Summer School on Language and Speech Communication held on the Island of Chios, Greece, in summer 2000.Besides an introductory survey, the book presents lectures on data analysis for multimedia libraries, pronunciation modeling for large vocabulary speech recognition, statistical language modeling, very large scale information retrieval, reduction of information variation in text, and a concluding chapter on open questions in research for linguistics in information access.The book gives newcomers to language and speech communication a clear overview of the main technologies and problems in the area. Researchers and professionals active in the area will appreciate the book as a concise review of the technologies used in text- and speech-triggered information access.

Modelling with Words is an emerging modelling methodology closely related to the paradigm of Computing with Words introduced by Lotfi Zadeh.This book is an authoritative collection of key contributions to the new concept of Modelling with Words. A wide range of issues in systems modelling and analysis is presented, extending from conceptual graphs and fuzzy quantifiers to humanist computing and self-organizing maps. Among the core issues investigated are- balancing predictive accuracy and high level transparency in learning- scaling linguistic algorithms to high-dimensional data problems- integrating linguistic expert knowledge with knowledge derived from data- identifying sound and useful inference rules- integrating fuzzy and probabilistic uncertainty in data modelling

This volume contains the Proceedings of ICFCA 2004, the 2nd International Conference on Formal Concept Analysis. The ICFCA conference series aims to be the premier forum for the publication of advances in applied lattice and order theory and in particular scienti?c advances related to formal concept analysis. Formal concept analysis emerged in the 1980s from e?orts to restructure lattice theory to promote better communication between lattice theorists and potentialusersoflatticetheory.Sincethen,the?eldhasdevelopedintoagrowing research area in its own right with a thriving theoretical community and an increasing number of applications in data and knowledge processing including data visualization, information retrieval, machine learning, data analysis and knowledge management. In terms of theory, formal concept analysis has been extended into attribute exploration, Boolean judgment, contextual logic and so on to create a powerful general framework for knowledge representation and reasoning. This conference aims to unify theoretical and applied practitioners who use formal concept an- ysis, drawing on the ?elds of mathematics, computer and library sciences and software engineering. The theme of the 2004 conference was 'Concept Lattices"e; to acknowledge the colloquial term used for the line diagrams that appear in almost every paper in this volume. ICFCA 2004 included tutorial sessions, demonstrating the practical bene?ts of formal concept analysis, and highlighted developments in the foundational theory and standards. The conference showcased the increasing variety of formal concept analysis software and included eight invited lectures from distinguished speakersinthe?eld.Sevenoftheeightinvitedspeakerssubmittedaccompanying papers and these were reviewed and appear in this volume.

Solving complex problems in real-world contexts, such as financial investment planning or mining large data collections, involves many different sub-tasks, each of which requires different techniques. To deal with such problems, a great diversity of intelligent techniques are available, including traditional techniques like expert systems approaches and soft computing techniques like fuzzy logic, neural networks, or genetic algorithms. These techniques are complementary approaches to intelligent information processing rather than competing ones, and thus better results in problem solving are achieved when these techniques are combined in hybrid intelligent systems. Multi-Agent Systems are ideally suited to model the manifold interactions among the many different components of hybrid intelligent systems.This book introduces agent-based hybrid intelligent systems and presents a framework and methodology allowing for the development of such systems for real-world applications. The authors focus on applications in financial investment planning and data mining.

ThePaci?c-AsiaConferenceonKnowledgeDiscoveryandDataMining(PAKDD) has been held every year since 1997. This year, the eighth in the series (PAKDD 2004) was held at Carlton Crest Hotel, Sydney, Australia, 26-28 May 2004. PAKDD is a leading international conference in the area of data mining. It p- vides an international forum for researchers and industry practitioners to share their new ideas, original research results and practical development experiences from all KDD-related areas including data mining, data warehousing, machine learning, databases, statistics, knowledge acquisition and automatic scienti?c discovery, data visualization, causal induction, and knowledge-based systems. The selection process this year was extremely competitive. We received 238 researchpapersfrom23countries,whichisthehighestinthehistoryofPAKDD, and re?ects the recognition of and interest in this conference. Each submitted research paper was reviewed by three members of the program committee. F- lowing this independent review, there were discussions among the reviewers, and when necessary, additional reviews from other experts were requested. A total of 50 papers were selected as full papers (21%), and another 31 were selected as short papers (13%), yielding a combined acceptance rate of approximately 34%. The conference accommodated both research papers presenting original - vestigation results and industrial papers reporting real data mining applications andsystemdevelopmentexperience.Theconferencealsoincludedthreetutorials on key technologies of knowledge discovery and data mining, and one workshop focusing on speci?c new challenges and emerging issues of knowledge discovery anddatamining.ThePAKDD2004programwasfurtherenhancedwithkeynote speeches by two outstanding researchers in the area of knowledge discovery and data mining: Philip Yu, Manager of Software Tools and Techniques, IBM T.J.

This volume contains the workshop proceedings of DEON 2004, the Seventh International Workshop on Deontic Logic in Computer Science. The DEON workshop series aims at bringing together researchers interested in topics - lated to the use of deontic logic in computer science. It traditionally promotes research in the relationship between normative concepts and computer science, arti?cial intelligence, organisation theory, and law. In addition to these topics, DEON 2004 placed special emphasis on the relationship between deontic logic and multi-agent systems. The workshop was held in Madeira, Portugal, on 26-28 May 2004. This v- ume includes all 15 papers presented at the workshop, as well as two abstracts from the two outstanding invited speakers we were privileged to host: Prof Mark Brown (Syracuse University, USA), and Prof Mike Wooldridge (University of Liverpool, UK). The reader will ?nd that the topics covered span from t- oretical investigations on deontic concepts and their formalisation in logic, to the use of deontic formalisms to verify and reason about multi-agent systems applications. We believe this makes it a well-balanced and interesting volume. We wish to thank all those who contributed to this workshop, and especially the authors of the submitted papers and the referees. They were all forced to work on a very tight timescale to make this volume a reality.

The fourth internationalworkshop,"e;EngineeringSocietiesin the Agents World"e; (ESAW 2003) was a three-dayevent that took place at the end of October 2003. After previous events in Germany, the Czech Republic, and Spain, the workshop crossed the Channel, to be held at the premises of Imperial College, London. The steady increase in the variety of backgrounds of contributing sci- tists, fascinating new perspectives on the topics, and number of participants, bespeaks the success of the ESAW workshop series. Its idea was born in 1999 among members of the working group on "e;Communication, Coordination, and Collaboration"e; of the ?rst lease of life of the European Network of Excellence on Agent-Based Computing, AgentLink, out of a critical discussion about the general mindset of the agent community. At that time, we felt that proper c- siderationsofsystemicaspectsofagenttechnologydeployment,suchasackno- edgement of the importance of the social and environmental perspectives, were sorely missing: a de?ciency that we resolved should be addressed directly by a new forum.

This volume contains selected papers presented at the 12th International C- ference on Conceptual Structures, ICCS 2004, held in Huntsville Alabama, July 19-23, 2004. The main theme of the conference, "e;Conceptual Structures at Work"e;, was chosen to express our intention of applying conceptual structures for hum- centered practical purposes. That invites us to develop not only clear conceptual theories,butalsomethodstosupporthumansintheapplicationofthesetheories in their societies. Some promising steps in this direction are being taken, but the gap between the researchers working on a highly sophisticated level on one side and the practitioners in many ?elds of applications on the other side is usually di?culttobridge.Someofushaveexperiencesinsuchpracticalcooperation,but we need more members of our community to be engaged in "e;real life problems"e;. We all know that solutions of complex problems in practice require not only a well-developed formal theory, but also an understanding of the whole context of the given problems. To support our understanding we need general philo- phical methods as well as formal theories for the representation of fundamental structures in practice. We believe that our community has powerful tools and methodsforsuccessfulapplicationsinpractice,butthatwemustdevelopaforum to present our results to a broader audience. First we must understand the s- ni?cant developments in our own group, which has activities in many directions of research.

The 11th Conference "e;Artificial Intelligence: Methodology, Systems, Applications - Semantic Web Challenges"e; (AIMSA 2004) continued successfully pursuing the main aim of the AIMSA series of conferences - to foster the multidisciplinary community of artificial intelligence researchers, embracing both the theoretic underpinnings of the field and the practical issues involved in development, deployment, and maintenance of systems with intelligent behavior. Since the first conference in 1984 AIMSA has provided an ideal forum for international scientific exchange between Central/Eastern Europe and the rest of the world and it is even more important nowadays in the uni- ing Europe. The current AIMSA edition is focused on Semantic Web methods and technologies. The Internet is changing the everyday services landscape, and the way we do things in almost every domain of our life. Web services are rapidly becoming the enabling technology of today's e-business and e-commerce systems, and will soon transform the Web as it is now into a distributed computation and application framework. The emerging Semantic Web paradigm promises to annotate Web artefacts to enable automated reasoning about them. When applied to e-services, the paradigm hopes to provide substantial automation for activities such as discovery, invocation, assembly, and monitoring of e-services. One hundred and seventy-six interesting papers were submitted to the conference.

Machine Learning has become a key enabling technology for many engineering applications, investigating scientific questions and theoretical problems alike. To stimulate discussions and to disseminate new results, a summer school series was started in February 2002, the documentation of which is published as LNAI 2600.This book presents revised lectures of two subsequent summer schools held in 2003 in Canberra, Australia, and in Tbingen, Germany. The tutorial lectures included are devoted to statistical learning theory, unsupervised learning, Bayesian inference, and applications in pattern recognition; they provide in-depth overviews of exciting new developments and contain a large number of references.Graduate students, lecturers, researchers and professionals alike will find this book a useful resource in learning and teaching machine learning.