The papers in this volume are the refereed papers presented at AI-2013, the Thirty-third SGAI International Conference on Innovative Techniques and Applications of Artificial Intelligence, held in Cambridge in December 2013 in both the technical and the application streams. They present new and innovative developments and applications, divided into technical stream sections on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining I, Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining II, Intelligent Agents, Representation and Reasoning, and Machine Learning and Constraint Programming, followed by application stream sections on Medical Applications, Applications in Education and Information Science, and AI Applications. The volume also includes the text of short papers presented as posters at the conference. This is the thirtieth volume in the Research and Development in Intelligent Systems series, which also incorporates the twenty-first volume in the Applications and Innovations in Intelligent Systems series. These series are essential reading for those who wish to keep up to date with developments in this important field.

The papers in this volume are the refereed papers presented at AI-2016, the Thirty-sixth SGAI International Conference on Innovative Techniques and Applications of Artificial Intelligence, held in Cambridge in December 2016 in both the technical and the application streams. They present new and innovative developments and applications, divided into technical stream sections on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Sentiment Analysis and Recommendation, Machine Learning, AI Techniques, and Natural Language Processing, followed by application stream sections on AI for Medicine and Disability, Legal Liability and Finance, Telecoms and eLearning, and Genetic Algorithms in Action. The volume also includes the text of short papers presented as posters at the conference. This is the thirty-third volume in the Research and Development in Intelligent Systems series, which also incorporates the twenty-fourth volume in the Applications and Innovations in Intelligent Systems series. These series are essential reading for those who wish to keep up to date with developments in this important field.

The papers in this volume are the refereed papers presented at AI-2014, the Thirty-fourth SGAI International Conference on Innovative Techniques and Applications of Artificial Intelligence, held in Cambridge in December 2014 in both the technical and the application streams. They present new and innovative developments and applications, divided into technical stream sections on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Machine Learning, and Agents, Ontologies and Genetic Programming, followed by application stream sections on Evolutionary Algorithms/Dynamic Modelling, Planning and Optimisation, and Machine Learning and Data Mining. The volume also includes the text of short papers presented as posters at the conference. This is the thirty-first volume in the Research and Development in Intelligent Systems series, which also incorporates the twenty-second volume in the Applications and Innovations in Intelligent Systems series. These series are essential reading for those who wish to keep up to date with developments in this important field.

The papers in this volume are the refereed papers presented at AI-2015, the Thirty-fifth SGAI International Conference on Innovative Techniques and Applications of Artificial Intelligence, held in Cambridge in December 2015 in both the technical and the application streams. They present new and innovative developments and applications, divided into technical stream sections on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Machine Learning and Knowledge Acquisition, and AI in Action, followed by application stream sections on Applications of Genetic Algorithms, Applications of Intelligent Agents and Evolutionary Techniques, and AI Applications. The volume also includes the text of short papers presented as posters at the conference. This is the thirty-second volume in the Research and Development in Intelligent Systems series, which also incorporates the twenty-third volume in the Applications and Innovations in Intelligent Systems series. These series are essential reading for those who wish to keep up to date with developments in this important field.

M.A.BRAMER University of Portsmouth, UK This volume comprises the refereed technical papers presented at ES2002, the Twenty-second SGAI International Conference on Knowledge Based Systems and Applied Artificial Intelligence, held in Cambridge in December 2002. The conference was organised by SGAI, the British Computer Society Specialist Group on Artificial Intelligence (previously known as SGES). The papers in this volume present new and innovative developments in the field, divided into sections on Machine Learning, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Knowledge Acquisition, Constraint Satisfaction, Scheduling and Natural Language Processing. This year's prize for the best refereed technical paper was won by a paper entitled Covering the Path Space: A Casebase Analysis for Mobile Robot Path Planning by M Kruusmaa (Department of Mechatronics, Tallinn Technical University, Estonia) and J Willemson (Department of Computer Science, Tartu University, Estonia). SGAI gratefully acknowledges the long-term sponsorship of Hewlett-Packard Laboratories (Bristol) for this prize, which goes back to the 1980s. This is the nineteenth volume in the Research and Development series. The Application Stream papers are published as a companion volume under the title Applications and Innovations in Intelligent Systems X. On behalf of the conference organising committee I should like to thank all those who contributed to the organisation of this year's technical programme, in particular the programme committee members, the referees and our administrators Linsay Turbert and Helen Forster.

An agent in a multi-agent system (MAS) has to generate plans for its individual goal, but these plans may con?ict with those that are already being scheduled or executed by other agents. It must also be able to complete its planning and resolution of these con?icts within a reasonable time to have an acceptable quality plan. Although we adopt hierarchical planning (HP, for example, see [7, 12]) using the decision-theoretic planning (DTP) approach [6] for ef?cient planning, it is not trivial to apply HPO to MAS. In HP, appropriate (abstract) plans are selected level by level to maximize the utility U (p), where where p is the expected ?nal plan comprising a sequence of primitive actions. However, in the MAS context, con?icts between agents affect the ef?ciency and quality of resulting plans. When a con?ict is found at lower levels, an additional sophisticated process for avoiding it (con?ict resolution) must be invoked and some extra actions (such as waiting for synchronization and detouring) may have to be added to the plan. The con?ict resolution process may become costly or fail. Even a single con?ict, if it is dif?cult to resolve, will result in a plan with considerably lower quality than it otherwise would have. As a result, in multi-agent systems, the second- or third-best plans may result in better overall performance.

The papers in this volume are the refereed technical papers presented at AI2005, the Twenty-fiftth SGAI International Conference on theory, practical and application of Artificial Intelligence, held in Cambridge in December 2005. The papers in this volume present new and innovative developments in the field, divided into sections on Machine Learning, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Knowledge Acquisition, Constraint Satisfaction and Scheduling, and Natural Language Processing. This is the twenty-first volume in the Research and Development series. The series is essential reading for those who wish to keep up to date with developments in this important field. The Application Stream papers are published as a companion volume under the title Applications and Innovations in Intelligent Systems XIII.

This book brings together scientists, researchers, practitioners, and students from academia and industry to present recent and ongoing research activities concerning the latest advances, techniques, and applications of natural language processing systems, and to promote the exchange of new ideas and lessons learned. Taken together, the chapters of this book provide a collection of high-quality research works that address broad challenges in both theoretical and applied aspects of intelligent natural language processing. The book presents the state-of-the-art in research on natural language processing, computational linguistics, applied Arabic linguistics and related areas. New trends in natural language processing systems are rapidly emerging – and finding application in various domains including education, travel and tourism, and healthcare, among others. Many issues encountered during the development of these applications can be resolved by incorporating language technology solutions. The topics covered by the book include: Character and Speech Recognition; Morphological, Syntactic, and Semantic Processing; Information Extraction; Information Retrieval and Question Answering; Text Classification and Text Mining; Text Summarization; Sentiment Analysis; Machine Translation Building and Evaluating Linguistic Resources; and Intelligent Language Tutoring Systems.

The topic of NoSQL databases has recently emerged, to face the Big Data challenge, namely the ever increasing volume of data to be handled. It is now recognized that relational databases are not appropriate in this context, implying that new database models and techniques are needed. This book presents recent research works, covering the following basic aspects: semantic data management, graph databases, and big data management in cloud environments. The chapters in this book report on research about the evolution of basic concepts such as data models, query languages, and new challenges regarding implementation issues.

This book consists of twelve different contributions that reflect several aspects of OC research. Therefore, we introduced four major categories summarizing the contents of the contributions as well as describing the different aspects of OC research in general: (1) design and architectures, (2) trustworthiness, (3) self-learning, and (4) self-x properties.