For many years, Arti?cial Intelligence technology has served in a great variety of successful applications. AI researchand researchershave contributed much to the vision of the so-called Information Society. As early as the 1980s, some of us imagined distributed knowledge bases containing the explicable knowledge of a company or any other organization. Today, such systems are becoming reality. In the process, other technologies have had to be developed and AI-technology has blended with them, and companies are now sensitive to this topic. TheInternetandWWWhaveprovidedtheglobalinfrastructure,whileatthe same time companies have become global in nearly every aspect of enterprise. This process has just started, a little experience has been gained, and therefore it is tempting to re?ect and try to forecast, what the next steps may be. This has given us one of the two main topics of the 23rd Annual German Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence (KI-99)held at the University of Bonn: The Knowledge Society. Two of our invited speakers, Helmut Willke, Bielefeld, and Hans-Peter Kriegel, Munich, dwell on di?erent aspects with di?erent perspectives. Helmut Willke deals with the concept of virtual organizations, while Hans-Peter Kriegel applies data mining concepts to pattern recognitiontasks.The three application forums are also part of the Knowledge Society topic: “IT-based innovation for environment and development”, “Knowledge management in enterprises”, and “Knowledgemanagementinvillageandcityplanningoftheinformationsociety”.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 30th Annual German Conference on Artificial Intelligence, KI 2007, held in Osnabrück, Germany, September 2007. The papers are organized in topical sections on cognition and emotion, semantic Web, analogy, natural language, reasoning, ontologies, spatio-temporal reasoning, machine learning, spatial reasoning, robot learning, classical AI problems, and agents.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 25th Annual German conference on Artificial Intelligence, KI 2002, held in Aachen, Germany in September 2002. The 20 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 58 submissions. The book offers topical sections on natural language processing; machine learning; knowledge representation, semantic web, and AI; neural networks; logic programming, theorem proving, and model checking; and vision and spatial reasoning.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Joint German/Austrian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, KI 2001, held in Vienna, Austria in September 2001. The 29 revised full technical papers presented together with one invited paper and four posters of industrial papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 79 submissions. All current aspects in AI are addressed, ranging from theoretical and foundational issues to industrial applications.

The 12th Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AI'QQ) held in Sydney, Australia, 6-10 December 1999, is the latest in a series of annual re gional meetings at which advances in artificial intelligence are reported. This series now attracts many international papers, and indeed the constitution of the program committee reflects this geographical diversity. Besides the usual tutorials and workshops, this year the conference included a companion sympo sium at which papers on industrial appUcations were presented. The symposium papers have been published in a separate volume edited by Eric Tsui. Ar99 is organized by the University of New South Wales, and sponsored by the Aus tralian Computer Society, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Computer Sciences Corporation, the KRRU group at Griffith University, the Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute, and Neuron- Works Ltd. Ar99 received over 120 conference paper submissions, of which about o- third were from outside Australia. Prom these, 39 were accepted for regular presentation, and a further 15 for poster display. These proceedings contain the full regular papers and extended summaries of the poster papers. All papers were refereed, mostly by two or three reviewers selected by members of the program committee, and a list of these reviewers appears later. The technical program comprised two days of workshops and tutorials, fol lowed by three days of conference and symposium plenary and paper sessions.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Planning, ECP'99, held in Durham, UK, in September 1999. The 27 revised full papers presented together with one invited survey were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. They address all current aspects of AI planning and scheduling. Several prominent planning paradigms are represented, including planning as satisfiability and other model checking strategies, planning as heuristic state-space search, and Graph-plan-based approaches. Moreover, various new scheduling approaches and combinations of planning and scheduling methods are introduced.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 37th Annual German Conference on Artificial Intelligence, KI 2014, held in Stuttgart, Germany, in September 2014. The 24 revised full papers presented together with 7 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 62 submissions. The papers are organized in thematic topics on cognitive modeling, computer vision, constraint satisfaction, search, and optimization, knowledge representation and reasoning, machine learning and data mining, planning and scheduling.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Artificial Life, ECAL 2007, held in Lisbon, Portugal. The 125 revised full papers cover morphogenesis and development, robotics and autonomous agents, evolutionary computation and theory, cellular automata, models of biological systems and their applications, ant colony and swarm systems, evolution of communication, simulation of social interactions, self-replication, artificial chemistry.

No matter what your perspective is, what your goals are, or how experienced you are, Artificial Life research is always a learning experience. The variety of phe nomena that the people who gathered in Lausanne reported and discussed for the fifth time since 1991 at the European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL) has not been programmed, crafted, or assembled by analytic design. It has evolved, emerged, or appeared spontaneously from a process of artificial evolution, se- organisation, or development. Artificial Life is a field where biological and artificial sciences meet and blend together, where the dynamics of biological life are reproduced in the memory of computers, where machines evolve, behave, and communicate like living organ isms, where complex life-like entities are synthesised from electronic chromo somes and artificial chemistries. The impact of Artificial Life in science, phi losophy, and technology is tremendous. Over the years the synthetic approach has established itself as a powerful method for investigating several complex phenomena of life. From a philosophical standpoint, the notion of life and of in telligence is continuously reformulated in relation to the dynamics of the system under observation and to the embedding environment, no longer a privilege of carbon-based entities with brains and eyes. At the same time, the possibility of engineering machines and software with life-like properties such as evolvability, self-repair, and self-maintainance is gradually becoming reality, bringing new perspectives in engineering and applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 38th Annual German Conference on Artificial Intelligence, KI 2015, held in Dresden, Germany, in September 2015. The 15 revised full technical papers presented together with 14 technical communications, 4 doctoral consortium contributions, and 3 keynotes were carefully reviewed and selected from 58 submissions. The conference provides the opportunity to present a wider range of results and ideas that are of interest to the KI audience, including reports about recent own publications, position papers, and previews of ongoing work.