The explanation of brain functioning in terms of the association of ideas has been popular since the 17th century. Recently, however, the process of association has been dismissed as computationally inadequate by prominent cognitive scientists. In this book, a sharper definition of the term “association” is used to revive the process by showing that associative learning can indeed be computationally powerful. Within an appropriate organization, associative learning can be embodied in a robot to realize a human-like intelligence, which sets its own goals, exhibits unique...

Dealing with uncertainty, moving from ignorance to knowledge, is the focus of cognitive processes. Understanding these processes and modelling, designing, and building artificial cognitive systems have long been challenging research problems.

This book describes the theory and methodology of a new, scientifically well-founded general approach, and its realization in the form of intelligent systems applicable in disciplines ranging from social sciences, such as cognitive science and sociology, through natural sciences, such as life sciences and chemistry, to applied sciences, such as...

In 1992 it seemed very difficult to answer the question whether it would be possible to develop a portable system for the automatic recognition and translation of spon taneous speech. Previous research work on speech processing had focused on read speech only and international projects aimed at automated text translation had just been terminated without achieving their objectives. Within this context, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) made a careful analysis of all national and international research projects conducted in the field of speech and language technology...

The main subject and objective of this book are logical foundations of non monotonic reasoning. This bears a presumption that there is such a thing as a general theory of non monotonic reasoning, as opposed to a bunch of systems for such a reasoning existing in the literature. It also presumes that this kind of reasoning can be analyzed by logical tools (broadly understood), just as any other kind of reasoning. In order to achieve our goal, we will provide a common logical basis and semantic representation in which different kinds of non monotonic reasoning can be interpreted and studied. The...

In 1992 it seemed very difficult to answer the question whether it would be possible to develop a portable system for the automatic recognition and translation of spon taneous speech. Previous research work on speech processing had focused on read speech only and international projects aimed at automated text translation had just been terminated without achieving their objectives. Within this context, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) made a careful analysis of all national and international research projects conducted in the field of speech and language technology...

This monograph describes a methodology for the design of knowledge-based systems. A knowledge-based system contains knowledge as well as information and data. The information and data in such a system can be modelled and imple mented as a database. The knowledge in such a system can be implemented either in a programming language or in an expert systems shell. This methodology has two distinguishing features. First, it is "unified." A unified methodology repre sents the data, information and knowledge in a homogeneous manner, as well as the relationships between them. Second, the methodology...

The primary aim of this monograph is to provide a formal framework for the representation and management of uncertainty and vagueness in the field of artificial intelligence. It puts particular emphasis on a thorough analysis of these phenomena and on the development of sound mathematical modeling approaches. Beyond this theoretical basis the scope of the book includes also implementational aspects and a valuation of existing models and systems. The fundamental ambition of this book is to show that vagueness and un certainty can be handled adequately by using measure-theoretic methods. The...

Logic Programming was founded 25 years ago. This exciting new text reveals both the evolution of this programming paradigm since its inception and the impressively broad scope of current research in Logic Programming. The contributions to the book deal with both theoretical and practical issues. They address such diverse topics as: computational molecular biology, machine learning, mobile computing, multi-agent systems, planning, numerical computing and dynamical systems, database systems, an alternative to the "formulas as types" approach, program semantics and analysis, and natural language...

It is a pleasure and an honor to be able to present this collection of papers to Ray Reiter on the occasion of his 60th birthday. To say that Ray's research has had a deep impact on the field of Artificial Intel ligence is a considerable understatement. Better to say that anyone thinking of do ing work in areas like deductive databases, default reasoning, diagnosis, reasoning about action, and others should realize that they are likely to end up proving corol laries to Ray's theorems. Sometimes studying related work makes us think harder about the way we approach a problem; studying Ray's...

With the rapid growth in the use of computers to manipulate, process, and reason about multimedia data, the problem of how to store and retrieve such data is becoming increasingly important. Thus, although the field of multimedia database systems is only about 5 years old, it is rapidly becoming a focus for much excitement and research effort. Multimedia database systems are intended to provide unified frameworks for requesting and integrating information in a wide variety of formats, such as audio and video data, document data, and image data. Such data often have special storage...