AAAI proceedings describe innovative concepts, techniques, perspectives, and observations that present promising research directions in artificial intelligence. The annual AAAI National Conference and Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference provide a forum for information exchange and interaction among researchers from all disciplines of AI. Contributions include theoretical, experimental, and empirical results. The technical papers published in this proceedings were selected by a rigorous, double-blind review process. The National Conference papers cover a myriad of topics, including agents, artificial intelligence and the world wide web, cognitive systems, constraint satisfaction problems, knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation, learning, model-based reasoning, natural language and information retrieval, planning, robotics, satisfiability, scheduling, search, tractable reasoning, and vision. The Innovative Applications Conference papers feature deployed and emerging applications. These papers will be of special benefit to AI applications developers. In addition, abstracts from the Invited talks, Intelligent Systems Demonstrations, Robotic Competition and Exhibition, SIGART/AAAI Doctoral Consortium, and Student programs are also included in this proceedings.

This book contains the extended versions of 33 papers selected among those originally presented at the Sixth Congress of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AI*IA). The congress of the AI*IA is the most relevant Italian event in the field of Artificial Intelligence, and has been receiving much attention from many researchers and practitioners of different countries. The sixth congress was held in Bologna, 14-17 September 1999, and was organized in twelve scientific sessions and one demo session. The papers here collected report on significant work carried out in different areas of artificial intelligence, in Italy and other countries. Areas such as automated reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, and machine learning continue to be thoroughly investigated. The collection also shows a growing interest in the field of multi-agent systems, perception and robotics, and temporal reasoning. Many people contributed in different ways to the success of the congress and to this volume. First of all, the members of the program committee who efficiently handled the reviewing of the 64 papers submitted to the congress, and later on the reviewing of the 41 papers submitted for publication in this volume. They provided three reviews for each manuscript, by relying on the support of valuable additional reviewers. The members of the organizing committee, namely Rosangela Barruffi, Paolo Bellavista, Anna Ciampolini, Marco Cremonini, Enrico Denti, Marco Gavanelli, Mauro Gaspari, Michela Milano, Rebecca Montanari, Andrea Omicini, Fabrizio Riguzzi, Cesare Stefanelli, and Paolo Torroni, worked hardy supporting at solving problems during and after the congress.

Real life problems are known to be messy, dynamic and multi-objective, and involve high levels of uncertainty and constraints. Because traditional problem-solving methods are no longer capable of handling this level of complexity, heuristic search methods have attracted increasing attention in recent years for solving such problems. Inspired by nature, biology, statistical mechanics, physics and neuroscience, heuristics techniques are used to solve many problems where traditional methods have failed. Data Mining: A Heuristic Approach will be a repository for the applications of these techniques in the area of data mining.

These are the proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents, held in Modena, Italy, September 6-8, 2001. Information agent technology has become one of the major key technologies for the Internet and the World Wide Web. It mainly emerged as a response to the challenges of cyberspace from both the technological and human user perspective. Development of information agents requires expertise from di?erent research disciplines such as Arti?cial Intelligence (AI), advanced databases and knowledge base systems, distributed information systems, information retrieval, and Human Computer Interaction (HCI). The ?fth international workshop on Cooperative Information Agents (CIA) continued the tradition by capturing the intrinsic interdisciplinary nature of the above research area by calling for contributions from di?erent research communities, and by promoting open and informative discussions on all related topics. In keeping with tradition, the workshop featured a sequence of regular and invited talks of excellence given by leading experts in the ?eld. This year the topics of the talks are mainly on the challenges of information agents in the upcoming age of ubiquitous and pervasive computing. These challenges are in particular due to the necessity of an e?cient utilization, evolution, and trust management of information agents for user-oriented information search, pro- sion, and visualization in networked computing environments with small, mobile, and embedded devices. A di?erent issue concerns the potential of agent-based support of massive distributed data warehousing worldwide.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AI 2002, held in Canberra, Australia in December 2002. The 62 revised full papers and 12 posters presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 117 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on natural language and information retrieval, knowledge representation and reasoning, deduction, learning theory, agents, intelligent systems. Bayesian reasoning and classification, evolutionary algorithms, neural networks, reinforcement learning, constraints and scheduling, neural network applications, satisfiability reasoning, machine learning applications, fuzzy reasoning, and case-based reasoning.

In this age of information overload, people use a variety of strategies to make choices about what to buy, how to spend their leisure time, and even whom to date. Recommender systems automate some of these strategies with the goal of providing affordable, personal, and high-quality recommendations. This book offers an overview of approaches to developing state-of-the-art recommender systems. The authors present current algorithmic approaches for generating personalized buying proposals, such as collaborative and content-based filtering, as well as more interactive and knowledge-based approaches. They also discuss how to measure the effectiveness of recommender systems and illustrate the methods with practical case studies. The final chapters cover emerging topics such as recommender systems in the social web and consumer buying behavior theory. Suitable for computer science researchers and students interested in getting an overview of the field, this book will also be useful for professionals looking for the right technology to build real-world recommender systems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th Conference of the Canadian Society for Computational Studies of Intelligence, AI 2003, held in Halifax, Canada in June 2003. The 30 revised full papers and 24 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 106 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on knowledge representation, search, constraint satisfaction, machine learning and data mining, AI and Web applications, reasoning under uncertainty, agents and multi-agent systems, AI and bioinformatics, and AI and e-commerce.

Testing of Communicating Systems XIV presents the latest international results in both the theory and industrial practice of the testing of communicating systems, ranging from tools and techniques for testing to test standards, frameworks, notations, algorithms, fundamentals of testing, and industrial experiences and issues. The tools and techniques discussed apply to conformance testing, interoperability testing, performance testing, Internet protocols and applications, and multimedia and distributed systems in general.

This book presents a subselection of papers presented at the ECAI 2000 Workshop on Balancing Reactivity and Social Deliberation in Multi-Agent Systems together with additional papers from well-known researchers in the field. The 13 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the present book. Besides two introductory survey papers, the book offers topical sections on architectures and frameworks, enhanced reactivity, and controlled social deliberation.