This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, AGI 2014, held in Quebec City, QC, Canada, in August 2014. The 22 papers and 8 posters were carefully reviewed and selected from 65 submissions. Researchers have recognized the necessity of returning to the original goals of the field by treating intelligence as a whole. Increasingly, there is a call for a transition back to confronting the more difficult issues of "human-level intelligence" and more broadly artificial general intelligence. AGI research differs from the ordinary AI research by stressing on the versatility and wholeness of intelligence and by carrying out the engineering practice according to an outline of a system comparable to the human mind in a certain sense. The AGI conference series has played and continues to play, a significant role in this resurgence of research on artificial intelligence in the deeper, original sense of the term of "artificial intelligence". The conferences encourage interdisciplinary research based on different understandings of intelligence and exploring different approaches.

Metaheuristics exhibit desirable properties like simplicity, easy parallelizability and ready applicability to different types of optimization problems such as real parameter optimization, combinatorial optimization and mixed integer optimization. They are thus beginning to play a key role in different industrially important process engineering applications, among them the synthesis of heat and mass exchange equipment, synthesis of distillation columns and static and dynamic optimization of chemical and bioreactors.

This book explains cutting-edge research techniques in related computational intelligence domains and their applications in real-world process engineering. It will be of interest to industrial practitioners and research academics.

Making a robot that looks and behaves like a human being has been the subject of many popular science fiction movies and books. Although the development of such a robot facesmanychallenges,themakingofavirtualhumanhaslongbeenpotentiallypossible. With recent advances in various key technologies related to hardware and software, the making of humanlike robots is increasingly becoming an engineering reality. Development of the required hardware that can perform humanlike functions in a lifelike manner has benefitted greatly from development in such technologies as biologically inspired materials, artificial intelligence, artificial vision, and many others. Producing a humanlike robot that makes body and facial expressions, communicates verbally using extensive vocabulary, and interprets speech with high accuracy is ext- mely complicated to engineer. Advances in voice recognition and speech synthesis are increasingly improving communication capabilities. In our daily life we encounter such innovations when we call the telephone operators of most companies today. As robotics technology continues to improve we are approaching the point where, on seeing such a robot, we will respond with ``Wow, this robot looks unbelievably real!'' just like the reaction to an artificial flower. The accelerating pace of advances in related fields suggests that the emergence of humanlike robots that become part of our daily life seems to be imminent. These robots are expected to raise ethical concerns and may also raise many complex questions related to their interaction with humans.

The three-volume set LNCS 8673, 8674, and 8675 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention, MICCAI 2014, held in Boston, MA, USA, in September 2014. Based on rigorous peer reviews, the program committee carefully selected 253 revised papers from 862 submissions for presentation in three volumes. The 100 papers included in the first volume have been organized in the following topical sections: microstructure imaging; image reconstruction and enhancement; registration; segmentation; intervention planning and guidance; oncology; and optical imaging.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Rough Sets and Current Trends in Computing, RSCTC 2014, held in Granada and Madrid, Spain, in July 2014. RSCTC 2014 together with the Conference on Rough Sets and Emerging Intelligent Systems Paradigms (RSEISP 2014) was held as a major part of the 2014 Joint Rough Set Symposium (JRS 2014) The 23 regular and 17 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 120 submissions. They are organized in topical sections such as fuzzy logic and rough set: tools for imperfect information; fuzzy-rough hybridization; three way decisions and probabilistic rough sets; new trends in formal concept analysis and related methods; fuzzy decision making and consensus; soft computing for learning from data; web information systems and decision making; image processing and intelligent systems.

This book features a selection of papers presented at the First IFIP WG 12.6 International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Knowledge Management, AI4KM 2012, held in Montpellier, France, in August 2012, in conjunction with the 20th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, ECAI 2012. The 11 revised and extended papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this volume. They present new research and innovative aspects in the field of knowledge management.

This book covers an approach to conversational informatics which encompasses science and technology for understanding and augmenting conversation in the network age. A major challenge in engineering is to develop a technology for conveying not just messages but also underlying wisdom. Relevant theories and practices in cognitive linguistics and communication science, as well as techniques developed in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence, are discussed.

The book expresses the conviction that the art of creating tools - Greek techne - changes its character together with the change of civilization epochs and co-determines such changes. This does not mean that tools typical for a civilization epoch determine it completely, but they change our way of perceiving and interpreting the world. There might have been many such epochs in the history of human civilization (much more than the three waves of agricultural, industrial and information civilization). This is expressed by the title Technen of the book, where n denotes a subsequent civilization epoch. During last fifty years we observed a decomposition of the old episteme (understood as a way of creating and interpreting knowledge characteristic for a given civilization epoch) of modernism, which was an episteme typical for industrial civilization. Today, the world is differently understood by the representatives of three different cultural spheres: of strict and natural sciences; of human and social sciences (especially by their part inclined towards postmodernism) and technical sciences that have a different episteme than even that of strict and natural sciences. Thus, we observe today not two cultures, but three different episteme. The book consists of four parts. First contains basic epistemological observations, second is devoted to selected elements of recent history of information technologies, third contains more detailed epistemological and general discussions, fourth specifies conclusions. The book is written from the cognitive perspective of technical sciences, with a full awareness - and discussion - of its differences from the cognitive perspective of strict sciences or human and social sciences. The main thesis of the book is that informational revolution will probably lead to a formation of a new episteme. The book includes discussions of many issues related to such general perspective, such as what is technology proper; what is intuition from a perspective of technology and of evolutionary naturalism; what are the reasons for and how large are the delays between a fundamental invention and its broad social utilization; what is the fundamental logical error (using paradoxes that are not real, only apparent) of the tradition of sceptical philosophy; what are rational foundations and examples of emergence of order out of chaos; whether civilization development based on two positive feedbacks between science, technology and the market might lead inevitably to a self-destruction of human civilization; etc.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Symposium on Experimental Algorithms, SEA 2014, held in Copenhagen, Denmark, in June/July 2014.

The 36 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited presentations were carefully reviewed and selected from 81 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on combinatorial optimization, data structures, graph drawing, shortest path, strings, graph algorithms and suffix structures.

Edited in collaboration with FoLLI, the Association of Logic, Language and Information this book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 21st Workshop on Logic, Language, Information and Communication, WoLLIC 2014, held in Valparaiso, Chile, in September 2014. The 15 contributed papers presented together with 6 invited lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from 29 submissions. The focus of the workshop was on the following subjects Inter-Disciplinary Research involving Formal Logic, Computing and Programming Theory, and Natural Language and Reasoning.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Web-Age Information Management, WAIM 2014, held in Macau, China, in June 2014. The 48 revised full papers presented together with 35 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on information retrieval; recommender systems; query processing and optimization; data mining; data and information quality; information extraction; mobile and pervasive computing; stream, time-series; security and privacy; semantic web; cloud computing; new hardware; crowdsourcing; social computing.

The European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI) is organized every year by the Association for Logic, Language and Information (FoLLI) in different sites around Europe. The main focus of ESSLLI is on the interface between linguistics, logic and computation. ESSLLI offers foundational, introductory and advanced courses, as well as workshops, covering a wide variety of topics within the three areas of interest: Language and Computation, Language and Logic, and Logic and Computation. The 16 papers presented in this volume have been selected among 44 papers presented by talks or posters at the Student Sessions of the 24th and 25th editions of ESSLLI, held in 2012 in Opole, Poland, and 2013 in Dusseldorf, Germany. The papers are extended versions of the versions presented, and have all been subjected to a second round of blind peer review.

Presenting current trends in the development and applications of intelligent systems in engineering, this monograph focuses on recent research results in system identification and control. The recurrent neurofuzzy and the fuzzy cognitive network (FCN) models are presented.Both models are suitable for partially-known or unknown complex time-varying systems. Neurofuzzy Adaptive Control contains rigorous proofs of its statements which result in concrete conclusions for the selection of the design parameters of the algorithms presented. The neurofuzzy model combines concepts from fuzzy systems and recurrent high-order neural networks to produce powerful system approximations that are used for adaptive control. The FCN modelstems from fuzzy cognitive maps and uses the notion of concepts and their causal relationships to capture the behavior of complex systems. The book shows how, with the benefit of proper training algorithms, these models are potent system emulators suitable for use in engineering systems.All chapters are supported by illustrative simulation experiments, while separate chapters are devoted to the potential industrial applications of each model including projects in:

contemporary power generation;

process control and

conventional benchmarking problems.

Researchers and graduate students working in adaptive estimation and intelligent control will find Neurofuzzy Adaptive Control of interest both for the currency of its models and because it demonstrates their relevance for real systems. The monograph also shows industrial engineers how to test intelligent adaptive control easily using proven theoretical results."

The importance of human-computer system interaction problems is increasing due to the growing expectations of users on general computer systems capabilities in human work and life facilitation. Users expect system which is not only a passive tool in human hands but rather an active partner equipped with a sort of artificial intelligence, having access to large information resources, being able to adapt its behavior to the human requirements and to collaborate with the human users. This book collects examples of recent human-computer system solutions. The content of the book is divided into three parts. Part I is devoted to detection, recognition and reasoning in different circumstances and applications. Problems associated with data modeling, acquisition and mining are presented by papers collected in part II and part III is devoted to Optimization.

This book presents a broad spectrum of problems related to statistics, mathematics, teaching, social science, and economics as well as a range of tools and techniques that can be used to solve these problems. It is the result of a scientific collaboration between experts in the field of economic and social systems from the University of Defence in Brno (Czech Republic), G. d'Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara (Italy), Pablo de Olavid eUniversity of Sevilla (Spain), and Ovidius University in Constanta, (Romania). The studies included were selected using a peer-review process and reflect heterogeneity and complexity of economic and social phenomena. They and present interesting empirical research from around the globe and from several research fields, such as statistics, decision making, mathematics, complexity, psychology, sociology and economics. The volume is divided into two parts. The first part, "Recent trends in mathematical and statistical models for economic and social sciences", collects papers on quantitative matters, which propose mathematical and statistical models for social sciences, economics, finance, and business administration. The second part, "Recent trends in qualitative theories for economic and social sciences", includes papers on qualitative matters, which discuss social, economic, and teaching issues. It is an ideal reference work for all those researchers interested in recent quantitative and qualitative tools. Covering a wide range of topics, it appeals in equal measure to mathematicians, statisticians, sociologists, philosophers, and specialists in the fields of communication, social and political sciences.

The work described in this book is an excellent example of interdisciplinary research in systems biology. It shows how concepts and approaches from the field of physics can be efficiently used to answer biological questions and reports on a novel methodology involving creative computer-based analyses of high-throughput biological data. Many of the findings described in the book, which are the result of collaborations between the author (a theoretical scientist) and experimental biologists and between different laboratories, have been published in high-quality peer-reviewed journals such as Molecular Cell and Nature. However, while those publications address different aspects of post-transcriptional gene regulation, this book provides readers with a complete, coherent and logical view of the research project as a whole. The introduction presents post-transcriptional gene regulation from a distinct angle, highlighting aspects of information theory and evolution and laying the groundwork for the questions addressed in the subsequent chapters, which concern the regulation of the transcriptome as the primary functional carrier of active genetic information.

DepCoS RELCOMEX is an annual series of conferences organized by Wroc aw University of Technology to promote a comprehensive approach to evaluation of system performability which is now commonly called "dependability." In contrast to classic analyses which were concentrated on reliability of technical resources and structures built from them, dependability is based on multi-disciplinary approach to theory, technology and maintenance of a system considered to be a multifaceted amalgamation of technical, information, organization, software and human (users, administrators, supervisors, etc.) resources. Diversity of processes being realized (data processing, system management, system monitoring, etc.), their concurrency and their reliance on in-system intelligence often severely impedes construction of strict mathematical models and calls for application of intelligent and soft computing methods.

This book presents the proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Dependability and Complex Systems DepCoS-RELCOMEX, which took place in Brunow Palace, Poland, from 30th June to 4th July, 2014. The articles selected for this volume illustrate the variety of topics that must be included in system dependability analysis: tools, methodologies and standards for modelling, design and simulation of the systems, security and confidentiality in information processing, specific issues of heterogeneous, today often wireless, computer networks or management of transportation networks."

This research monograph presents selected areas of applications in the field of control systems engineering using computational intelligence methodologies. A number of applications and case studies are introduced. These methodologies are increasing used in many applications of our daily lives. Approaches include, fuzzy-neural multi model for decentralized identification, model predictive control based on time dependent recurrent neural network development of cognitive systems, developments in the field of Intelligent Multiple Models based Adaptive Switching Control, designing military training simulators using modelling, simulation, and analysis for operational analyses and training, methods for modelling of systems based on the application of Gaussian processes, computational intelligence techniques for process control and image segmentation technique based on modified particle swarm optimized-fuzzy entropy.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Computer Games Workshop, CGW 2013, held in Beijing, China, in August 2013, in conjunction with the Twenty-third International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI 2013. The 9 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 15 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics related to computer games. They discuss six games that are played by humans in practice: Chess, Domineering, Chinese Checkers, Go, Goofspiel, and Tzaar. Moreover, there are papers about the Sliding Tile Puzzle, an application, namely, Cooperative Path-Finding Problems, and on general game playing.

A recent area of interest in the Artificial Intelligence community has been the application of massively parallel algorithms to enhance the choice mechanism in traditional AI problems. This volume provides a detailed description of how marker-passing -- a parallel, non-deductive, spreading activation algorithm -- is a powerful approach to refining the choice mechanisms in an AI problem-solving system.
The author scrutinizes the design of both the algorithm and the system, and then reviews the current literature and research in planning and marker passing. Also included: a comparison of this computer model with some standard cognitive models, and a comparison of this model to the "connectionist" approach.

When discussing classification, support vector machines are known to be a capable and efficient technique to learn and predict with high accuracy within a quick time frame. Yet, their black box means to do so make the practical users quite circumspect about relying on it, without much understanding of the how and why of its predictions. The question raised in this book is how can this 'masked hero' be made more comprehensible and friendly to the public: provide a surrogate model for its hidden optimization engine, replace the method completely or appoint a more friendly approach to tag along and offer the much desired explanations? Evolutionary algorithms can do all these and this book presents such possibilities of achieving high accuracy, comprehensibility, reasonable runtime as well as unconstrained performance.

This two-volume set, consisting of LNCS 8403 and LNCS 8404, constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics, CICLing 2014, held in Kathmandu, Nepal, in April 2014. The 85 revised papers presented together with 4 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 300 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: lexical resources; document representation; morphology, POS-tagging, and named entity recognition; syntax and parsing; anaphora resolution; recognizing textual entailment; semantics and discourse; natural language generation; sentiment analysis and emotion recognition; opinion mining and social networks; machine translation and multilingualism; information retrieval; text classification and clustering; text summarization; plagiarism detection; style and spelling checking; speech processing; and applications.

This two-volume set, consisting of LNCS 8403 and LNCS 8404, constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics, CICLing 2014, held in Kathmandu, Nepal, in April 2014. The 85 revised papers presented together with 4 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 300 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: lexical resources; document representation; morphology, POS-tagging, and named entity recognition; syntax and parsing; anaphora resolution; recognizing textual entailment; semantics and discourse; natural language generation; sentiment analysis and emotion recognition; opinion mining and social networks; machine translation and multilingualism; information retrieval; text classification and clustering; text summarization; plagiarism detection; style and spelling checking; speech processing; and applications.

This book studies how technological solutions can be used to alleviate the current state of legal systems, with their clogged up courtrooms and inefficient conflict resolution methods. It reviews the shortcomings and disadvantages of traditional and alternative conflict resolution methods and turns to Artificial Intelligence for problem-solving techniques and solutions. The book is divided into four parts. The first part presents a general and systematic analysis of the current state of the legal systems, identifying the main problems and their causes.It then moves on to present UM Court: a framework for testing and prototyping conflict resolution services. This framework was developed with the objective of using Artificial Intelligence techniques to build a service environment for conflict resolution. The third part of the book takes a step into the future by analyzing the use of Intelligent Environments in the support of conflict management and resolution. It describes the approach taken and the experiments performed in the Intelligent Systems Lab of the University of Minho. The final part of the book contains the conclusions and shows the potential advantages of the use of Intelligent Environments as a way to implement better conflict resolution procedures (virtual or real), in which all the participants have access to more and better information and are able to take better informed decisions."

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the second International Workshop on the Theory and Applications of Formal Argumentation, TAFA 2013, held in Beijing, China, in August 2013. The Workshop was co-located with IJCAI 2013. The 15 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 22 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections such as abstract argumentation frameworks, social abstract argumentation with votes on attacks, a normal form of argumentation frameworks, assumption-based argumentation, argument schemes for normative practical reasoning.