Agents act on the basis of their beliefs and these beliefs change as they interact with other agents. In this book the authors propose and explain general logical tools for handling change. These tools include preferential reasoning, theory revision, and reasoning in inheritance systems, and the authors use these tools to examine nonmonotonic logic, deontic logic, counterfactuals, modal logic, intuitionistic logic, and temporal logic.

This book will be of benefit to researchers engaged with artificial intelligence, and in particular agents, multiagent systems and nonmonotonic...

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...

Reinforcement learning has developed as a successful learning approach for domains that are not fully understood and that are too complex to be described in closed form. However, reinforcement learning does not scale well to large and continuous problems. Furthermore, acquired knowledge specific to the learned task, and transfer of knowledge to new tasks is crucial.

In this book the author investigates whether deficiencies of reinforcement learning can be overcome by suitable abstraction methods. He discusses various forms of spatial abstraction, in particular qualitative...

Programming languages are often classified according to their paradigms, e.g. imperative, functional, logic, constraint-based, object-oriented, or aspect-oriented. A paradigm characterizes the style, concepts, and methods of the language for describing situations and processes and for solving problems, and each paradigm serves best for programming in particular application areas. Real-world problems, however, are often best implemented by a combination of concepts from different paradigms, because they comprise aspects from several realms, and this combination is more comfortably realized...

Emotion pervades human life in general, and human communication in particular, and this sets information technology a challenge. Traditionally, IT has focused on allowing people to accomplish practical tasks efficiently, setting emotion to one side. That was acceptable when technology was a small part of life, but as technology and life become increasingly interwoven we can no longer ask people to suspend their emotional nature and habits when they interact with technology.

The European Commission funded a series of related research projects on emotion and computing, culminating in...

Soft computing comprises various paradigms dedicated to approximately solving real-world problems, e.g. in decision making, classification or learning; among these paradigms are fuzzy sets, rough sets, neural networks, genetic algorithms, and others.

It is well understood now in the soft computing community that hybrid approaches combining various paradigms are very promising approaches for solving complex problems. Exploiting the potential and strength of both neural networks and rough sets, this book is devoted to rough-neuro computing which is also related to the novel aspect of...