Logic is one of the most popular approaches to artificial intelligence. A potential obstacle to the use of logic is its high computational complexity, as logical inference is an extraordinarily powerful computational device.
This book is concerned with computational aspects of the logical approach to AI. The focus is on two strategies for achieving computational tractability in knowledge representation and reasoning by language restriction and approximation. Several formalisms for knowledge representation are taken into account; among the computational problems studied are checking...

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed and revised post-workshop proceedings of the International Workshop on Automated Deduction in Geometry, held in Toulouse, France, in September 1996. The revised extended papers accepted for inclusion in the volume were selected on the basis of double reviewing. Among the topics covered are automated geometric reasoning and the deduction applied to Dixon resultants, Grobner bases, characteristic sets, computational geometry, algebraic geometry, and planet motion; furthermore the system REDLOG is demonstrated and the verification of geometric...

A special year like 1999 invites one to draw a balance of what has been achieved in the roughly 30 years of research and development in knowledge based systems (still abbreviated as XPS following the older term "expert systems") and to take a look at th what the future may hold. For the 5 German conference on knowledge-based systems we therefore asked current and former speakers of the four working groups (FG's) in the subdivision of knowledge-based systems (FA 1.5) of the German association of Informatics (GI) to present a survey of and future prospects for their respective fields: knowledge...

This text presents the proceedings of the 4th European Conference on Computational Learning Theory. The 23 contributions address topics such as learning from queries and counter examples, reinforcement learning, online learning and export advice, teaching and learning and inductive inference.

This volume brings together the work of researchers from various disciplines where aspects of descriptive, mathematical, computational or design knowledge concerning metaphor and analogy, especially in the context of agents, have emerged. The book originates from an international workshop on Computation for Metaphors, Analogy, and Agents (CMAA), held in Aizu, Japan in April 1998.
The 19 carefully reviewed and revised papers presented together with an introduction by the volume editor are organized into sections on Metaphor and Blending, Embodiment, Interaction, Imitation, Situated Mapping...

Autonomousagents andmultiagentsystems are computationalsystems inwhich several (semi-)autonomous agents interact each other or work together to p- form some set of tasks or satisfy some set of goals. These systems may involve computationalagents that are homogeneous or heterogeneous, they may involve activities on the part of agents having common goals or distinct goals, and they may involve participation on the part of humans and intelligent agents. The increase of agent research activities can be observed in the series of ICMAS (- ternational Conference of Multi-Agent Systems). In ICMAS...

If you are sitting in a basement room without a view not to mention the bars in front of the windows and writing a book, then you better have good company. I had the best company you could imagine. Waltraud Hiltl, Katja Markert, Martin Romacker, Klemens Schnattinger, Andreas Klee and I shared very little o?ce space, but plenty of chocolate, co?ee, champagne, and enthusiasm for our research. North German coolness and creativity sprang mostly from my colleagues in the second ?oor. I learned a lot from and laughed a lot with Nobi Br]oker, Susanne (Sue) Schacht, Manfred Klenner, Peter Neuhaus,...

As well as conveying a message in words and sounds, the speech signal carries information about the speaker's own anatomy, physiology, linguistic experience and mental state. These speaker characteristics are found in speech at all levels of description: from the spectral information in the sounds to the choice of words and utterances themselves.

This volume and its companion volume, LNAI 4441, constitute a state-of-the-art survey for the field of speaker classification. They approach the following questions: What characteristics of the speaker become manifest in his or her...

Five years ago, with excitement and uncertainty, we witnessed the birth of PRIMA (Paci?c Rim International Workshop on Multi-Agents). The ?rst PRIMA in 1998 has now grown into PRIMA 2003, the 6th Paci?c Rim Inter- tional Workshop on Multi-Agents in Seoul, Korea. During a period of ?ve years, the notion of agent research has grown so much that we hear the term agent on a daily basis. Various ?elds such as business, the Web, software engineering, on-line games and such are now using the term agent as a placeholder, just like the term object is used in the object-oriented paradigm. On the other...

Human conversational partners are able, at least to a certain extent, to detect the speaker's or listener's emotional state and may attempt to respond to it accordingly. When instead one of the interlocutors is a computer a number of questions arise, such as the following: To what extent are dialogue systems able to simulate such behaviors? Can we learn the mechanisms of emotional be- viors from observing and analyzing the behavior of human speakers? How can emotionsbeautomaticallyrecognizedfromauser'smimics, gesturesandspeech? What possibilities does a dialogue system have to express...