This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence, EPTA 2001, held in Porto, Portugal, in December 2001. The 21 revised long papers and 18 revised short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 88 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on extraction of knowledge from databases, AI techniques for financial time series analysis, multi-agent systems, AI logics and logic programming, constraint satisfaction, and AI planning.
The tenth Portuguese Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence, EPIA 2001 was held in Porto and continued the tradition of previous conferences in the series. It returned to the city in which the ?rst conference took place, about 15 years ago. The conference was organized, as usual, under the auspices of the Portuguese Association for Arti?cial Intelligence (APPIA, http://www.appia.pt). EPIA maintained its international character and continued to provide a forum for p- senting and discussing researc h on di?erent aspects of Arti?cial Intelligence. To promote motivated discussions among participants, this conference streng- ened the role of the thematic workshops. These were not just satellite events, but rather formed an integral part of the conference, with joint sessions when justi?ed. This had the advantage that the work was presented to a motivated audience. This was the ?rst time that EPIA embarked on this experience and so provided us with additional challenges.
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed postproceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Programming Multi-Agent Systems, ProMAS 2006, held in Hakodate, Japan, May 2006. Coverage includes uncertainty of agents; lightweight devices for business and e-commerce applications; component-based agents for MAS simulation; creation, execution, mobility and communication of agents; as well as multi-agent platforms and organization.
This book contains a collection of thoroughly revised tutorial papers based on lectures given by leading researchers at the 4th International Summer School on the Reasoning Web, held in Venice, Italy, in September 2008. The objective of the book is to provide a coherent introduction to semantic web methods and research issues with a particular focus on reasoning. The seven tutorial papers presented provide competent coverage of methods and major application areas such as social networks, semantic multimedia indexing and retrieval, bioinformatics, and semantic web services. They highlight which techniques are already being successfully applied for purposes such as improving the performance of information retrieval algorithms, enabling the interoperation of heterogeneous agents, modelling users profiles and social relations, and standardizing and improving the accuracy of very large and dynamic scientific databases.
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Environments for Multiagent Systems, E4MAS 2005, held in Utrecht, The Netherlands, in July 2005, as an associated event of AAMAS 2005. The 16 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from the lectures given at the workshop completed by a number of invited papers of prominent researchers active in the domain. The papers are organized in topical sections on models, architecture, and design, mediated coordination, as well as applications.
Intelligent systems are necessary to handle modern computer-based technologies managing information and knowledge. This book discusses the theories required to help provide solutions to difficult problems in the construction of intelligent systems. Particular attention is paid to situations in which the available information and data may be imprecise, uncertain, incomplete or of a linguistic nature. The main aspects of clustering, classification, summarization, decision making and systems modeling are also addressed. Topics covered in the book include fundamental issues in uncertainty, the rapidly emerging discipline of information aggregation, neural networks, Bayesian networks and other network methods, as well as logic-based systems.
Professor Richard S. Michalski passed away on September 20, 2007. Once we learned about his untimely death we immediately realized that we would no longer have with us a truly exceptional scholar and researcher who for several decades had been inf- encing the work of numerous scientists all over the world - not only in his area of expertise, notably machine learning, but also in the broadly understood areas of data analysis, data mining, knowledge discovery and many others. In fact, his influence was even much broader due to his creative vision, integrity, scientific excellence and exceptionally wide intellectual horizons which extended to history, political science and arts. Professor Michalski’s death was a particularly deep loss to the whole Polish sci- tific community and the Polish Academy of Sciences in particular. After graduation, he began his research career at the Institute of Automatic Control, Polish Academy of Science in Warsaw. In 1970 he left his native country and hold various prestigious positions at top US universities. His research gained impetus and he soon established himself as a world authority in his areas of interest – notably, he was widely cons- ered a father of machine learning.
The ?rst workshop “Engineering Societies in the Agents World” (ESAW) was held in August 2000, in conjunction with the 14th European Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence (ECAI 2000) in Berlin. It was launched by a group of - searchers who thought that the design and development of MASs (multi-agent systems) not only needed adequate theoretical foundations but also a call for new techniques, methodologies and infrastructures to develop MASs as arti?cial societies. The second ESAW was co-located with the European Agent Summer School (ACAI 2001) in Prague, and mostly focused on logics and languages, middleware, infrastructures and applications. In Madrid, the third ESAW c- centrated on models and methodologies and took place with the “Cooperative Information Agents” workshop (CIA 2002). The fourth ESAW in London was the ?rst one that ran as a stand-alone event: apart from the usual works on methodologies and models, it also stressed the issues of applications and m- tidisciplinary models. Based on the success of previous ESAWs, and also given that the di?cult challenges in the construction of arti?cial societies are not yet fully addressed, the ?fth ESAW workshop was organized in the same spirit as its predecessors. Inparticular,ESAW2004tookplaceattheIRITlaboratoryoftheUniversit ́ e “Paul Sabatier” (Toulouse, France), at the end of October 2004. It was not - located with any other scienti?c event, in the same way as ESAW 2003. ESAW 2004 remained committed to the use of the notion of MASs as the seeds for animated, constructive and highly interdisciplinary discussions about techno- gies,methodologiesandtoolsfortheengineeringofcomplexdistributedsystems.
This book presents selected extended and reviewed versions of the papers accepted for the First International Workshop on Regulated Agent Systems: Theory and Applications, RASTA 2002, held in Bologna, Italy, in July 2002, as part of AAMAS 2002. In addition, several new papers on the workshop theme are included as well; these were submitted and reviewed in response to a further call for contributions. The construction of artificial agent societies deals with questions and problems that are already known from human societies. The 16 papers in this book establish an interdisciplinary community of social scientists and computer scientists devoting their research interests to exploiting social theories for the construction and regulation of multi-agent systems.
