This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Conceptual Structures, ICCS 2001, held in Stanford, CA, USA in July/August 2001.The 26 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the proceedings. The book offers topical sections on language and knowledge structures, logical and mathematical foundations of conceptual structures, conceptual structures for data and knowledge bases, conceptual structures and meta-data, and algorithms and systems.

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.

Multimodal Interfaces represents an emerging interdisciplinary research direction and has become one of the frontiers in Computer Science. Multimodal interfaces aim at efficient, convenient and natural interaction and communication between computers (in their broadest sense) and human users. They will ultimately enable users to interact with computers using their everyday skills. These proceedings include the papers accepted for presentation at the Third International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI 2000) held in Beijing, China on 1416 O ctober 2000. The papers were selected from 172 contributions submitted worldwide. Each paper was allocated for review to three members of the Program Committee, which consisted of more than 40 leading researchers in the field. Final decisions of 38 oral papers and 48 poster papers were made based on the reviewers' comments and the desire for a balance of topics. The decision to have a single track conference led to a competitive selection process and it is very likely that some good submissions are not included in this volume. The papers collected here cover a wide range of topics such as affective and perceptual computing, interfaces for wearable and mobile computing, gestures and sign languages, face and facial expression analysis, multilingual interfaces, virtual and augmented reality, speech and handwriting, multimodal integration and application systems. They represent some of the latest progress in multimodal interfaces research.

This textbook provides a compact but comprehensive treatment that provides analytical and design steps to recurrent neural networks from scratch. It provides a treatment of the general recurrent neural networks with principled methods for training that render the (generalized) backpropagation through time (BPTT). This author focuses on the basics and nuances of recurrent neural networks, providing technical and principled treatment of the subject, with a view toward using coding and deep learning computational frameworks, e.g., Python and Tensorflow-Keras. Recurrent neural networks are treated holistically from simple to gated architectures, adopting the technical machinery of adaptive non-convex optimization with dynamic constraints to leverage its systematic power in organizing the learning and training processes. This permits the flow of concepts and techniques that provide grounded support for design and training choices. The author's approach enables strategic co-training of output layers, using supervised learning, and hidden layers, using unsupervised learning, to generate more efficient internal representations and accuracy performance. As a result, readers will be enabled to create designs tailoring proficient procedures for recurrent neural networks in their targeted applications.

These arethe proceedingsof the Fourth InternationalWorkshopon Cooperative Information Agents, held in Boston Massachusetts, USA, July 7-9, 2000. Cooperative information agent research and development focused originally onaccessingmultiple, heterogeneous, anddistributedinformationsources. Ga- ingaccesstothesesystems, throughInternetsearchengines, applicationprogram interfaces, wrappers, and web-based screens has been an important focus of - operative intelligent agents. Research has also focused on the integration of this information into a coherent model that combined data and knowledge from the multiple sources. Finally, this information is disseminated to a wide audience, giving rise to issues such as data quality, information pedigree, source reliability, information security, personal privacy, and information value. Research in - operative information agents has expanded to include agent negotiation, agent communities, agent mobility, as well as agent collaboration for information d- covery in constrained environments. TheinterdisciplinaryCIAworkshopseriesencompassesa widevarietyoft- ics dealing with cooperative information agents. All workshop proceedings have been published by Springer as Lecture Notes in Arti?cial Intelligence, Volumes 1202 (1997), 1435 (1998), and 1652 (1999), respectively. This year, the theme of the CIA workshop was The Future of Information Agents in Cyberspace, a very ?tting topic as the use of agents for information gathering, negotiation, correlation, fusion, and dissemination becomes ever more prevalent. We noted a marked trend in CIA 2000 towards addressing issues related to communities of agents that: (1) negotiate for information resources, (2) build robust ontologies to enhance search capabilities, (3) communicate for planning and problem so- ing, (4) learn and evolve based on their experiences, and (5) assume increasing degrees of autonomy in the control of complex systems."

This volume contains the refereed technical papers presented at ES99, the Nineteenth SGES International Conference on Knowledge-Based Systems and Applied Artificial Intelligence, held in Cambridge in December 1999. The papers in this volume present new and innovative developments in the field, divided into sections on knowledge engineering, knowledge discovery, case-based reasoning, learning and knowledge representation and refinement. This is the sixteenth 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 VII.

Seit 1995 fuhrt das Standardwerk umfassend in die Konzepte der internationalen Norm fur Programmiersysteme von speicherprogrammierbaren Steuerungen ein. Den Autoren gelingt es, schwierige Inhalte anhand zahlreicher Beispiele, Abbildungen und Tabellen leicht verstandlich darzustellen. Sie klaren zudem Hintergrunde sowie Zusammenhange zu angrenzenden Fachgebieten auf. Die 4. Auflage wurde an den neuesten Stand der Normung angepasst. Geeignet ist das Lehr- und Nachschlagewerk fur Berufseinsteiger und -umsteiger ebenso wie fur Schuler und Studenten."

If you are sitting in a basement room without a view - not to mention the bars in front of the windows - and writing a book, then you better have good company. I had the best company you could imagine. Waltraud Hiltl, Katja Markert, Martin Romacker, Klemens Schnattinger, Andreas Klee and I shared very little o?ce space, but plenty of chocolate, co?ee, champagne, and enthusiasm for our research. North German coolness and creativity sprang mostly from my colleagues in the second ?oor. I learned a lot from and laughed a lot with Nobi Br]oker, Susanne (Sue) Schacht, Manfred Klenner, Peter Neuhaus, Stefan Schulz, and Michael Strube. I thank my friend and partner Angela R]osch for motivational and te- nical support and for living together with someone who cares about strange things, works too much and does not improve in any way over the years. Special thanks go to my family who sometimes wondered what was going on when I started talking enthusiastically about "semantics," but they never let wane their encouragement for me. Kornel Marco provided great service by implementing parts of the system presented in this book. Joe Bush helped me polish up the text with his capabilities as an American native speaker. Remaining errors are entirely my fault and due to my lack of diligence. This book would not have seen the light of day without the dissertation grant through the Graduiertenkolleg "Menschliche & Maschinelle Intelligenz" funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)."

Following on from a three-year knowledge management project, seven organisations formed aco-operative group for knowledge management. This group meets through the Knowledge Management Implementers Forum (KMIF). Each of the organisations participating in this work are, by implication, interested in the development of KM. The aims of the forum are t9 exchange ideas and share experience in the areaofknowledge management. The organisations involved are: ~ British Aerospace (Samlesbury) ~ ICI ~ ICL ~ North WestWater ~ IDS Cad-Graphics ~ Liverpool John Moores University ~ NWAIAG (Blackburn College) 1.1 The Organisations Involved Each ofthe organisations has specific reasons for being involved in this project and in KM. The British Aerospace Samlesbury site is a large manufacturing site employing ground breaking technology for Europe's front line military aircraft. The factory works with a well-managed supply chain and works closely with other British Aerospace sites in the manufacture of aircraft components. It has set up a partnership with another Aerospace Company based on exchange of knowledge and therefore needs to value that knowledge. ICI is one of the UK's leading chemical companies and plays on an international stage. Changes in international supply and demand require ICI to respond quickly to market pressures. This means that the company needs to use its knowledge assets in a well managed way and put systems in place that increase the flexibility and ensure the security ofthese important assets.

Computer-based diagnostic systems are among the most successful applications of knowledge-based systems (KBS) technology. Chris Price shows the best way to build effective diagnostic systems for different types of diagnostic problems by: - giving examples of different solutions to the problem of building effective diagnostic systems - helping you to decide on an appropriate strategy for building a diagnostic system to aid troubleshooting of that diagnostic problem - showing how to use diagnostic fault trees as a common representation for discussing different ways of approaching diagnosis. Computer-Based Diagnostic Systems is written in such a way as to make the material easy to understand even when you do not have easy access to the commercial tools.

The biennial International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (ICCBR) - ries, which began in Sesimbra, Portugal, in 1995, was intended to provide an international forum for the best fundamental and applied research in case-based reasoning (CBR). It was hoped that such a forum would encourage the g- wth and rigor of the eld and overcome the previous tendency toward isolated national CBR communities. The foresight of the original ICCBR organizers has been rewarded by the growth of a vigorous and cosmopolitan CBR community. CBR is now widely recognized as a powerful and important computational technique for a wide range of practical applications. By promoting an exchange of ideas among CBR researchers from across the globe, the ICCBR series has facilitated the broader acceptance and use of CBR. ICCBR-99 has continued this tradition by attracting high-quality research and applications papers from around the world. Researchers from 21 countries submitted 80 papers to ICCBR-99. From these submissions, 17 papers were selected for long oral presentation, 7 were accepted for short oral presentation, and 19 papers were accepted as posters. This volume sets forth these 43 papers, which contain both mature work and innovative new ideas.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Cooperative Information Systems, CIA'99, held in Uppsala, Sweden in July/August 1999.
The 16 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 46 submissions. Also included are ten invited contributions by leading experts. The volume is divided in sections on information discovery and management on the Internet; information agents on the Internet-prototypes systems and applications; communication and collaboration, mobile information agents; rational information agents for electronic business; service mediation and negotiation; and adaptive personal assistance.

ThisvolumecontainsaselectionofpaperspresentedattheInternationalConf- ence on Analytic Tableaux and Related Methods (TABLEAUX'99) held on June 7-11, 1999 at the Inn at Saratoga, Saratoga Springs, NY, USA. This conference was the continuation of international meetings on Theorem Proving with A- lytic Tableaux and Related Methods held in Lautenbach near Karlsruhe (1992), Marseille (1993), Abingdon near Oxford (1994), St. Goar near Koblenz (1995), Terrasini near Palermo (1996), Pont-' a-Mousson near Nancy (1997), and Oist- wijk near Tilburg (1998). TABLEAUX'99 marks the ?rst time the conference has been held in North America. Tableau and related methods have been found to be convenient and e?ective for automating deduction in various non-standard logics as well as in classical logic. Examples taken from this meeting alone include temporal, description, tense, quantum, modal, projective, hybrid, intuitionistic, and linear logics. - eas of application include veri?cation of software and computer systems, ded- tive databases, knowledge representation and its required inference engines, and system diagnosis. The conference brought together researchers interested in all aspects - theoretical foundations, implementation techniques, systems devel- ment and applications - of the mechanization of reasoning with tableaux and related methods.

Uncertaintyisanincreasinglyimportantresearchtopicinmanyareasofc- puterscience. Manyformalismsarebeingdeveloped,withmuchinterestatthe theoryleveldirectedatdevelopingabetterunderstandingoftheformalismsand identifyingrelationshipsbetweenformalisms,andatthetechnologyleveldirected atdevelopingsoftwaretoolsforformalismsandapplicationsofformalisms. ThemainEuropeanforumforthesubjectistheEuropeanConferenceon SymbolicandQuantitativeApproachestoReasoningandUncertainty(EC- SQARU). FollowingthesuccessofthepreviousECSQARUconferences,heldin Marseilles(1991),Granada(1993),Fribourg(1995),andBonn(1997),the?fth conferenceintheserieswasheldatUniversityCollegeLondoninJuly1999. ThisvolumecontainspapersacceptedforpresentationatECSQARU'99. In additiontothemainconference,twoworkshopswereheld. The?rstwason DecisionTheoreticandGameTheoreticAgents,chairedbySimonParsonsand MikeWooldridge,andthesecondwasonLogicalandUncertaintyModelsfor InformationSystems,chairedbyFabioCrestaniandMouniaLalmas. Selected papersfromtheworkshopsarealsoincludedintheseproceedings. Weareindebitedtotheprogrammmecommitteefortheire?ortinorganising theprogramme,totheinvitedspeakers,andtothepresentersofthetutorials. Furthermore,wegratefullyacknowledgethecontributionofthemanyreferees whowereinvolvedinthereviewingprocess. Finallywewouldliketothankthe DepartmentofComputerScienceatUniversityCollegeLondonforadminist- tivesupport. ProgrammeCommittee TheprogrammecommitteewaschairedbyAnthonyHunter(UniversityCollege London),andcomprisedDovGabbay(King'sCollegeLondon),FinnJensen (AalborgUniversity),RudolfKruse(UniversityofMagdeburg),SimonParsons (QueenMary,UniversityofLondon)HenriPrade(IRIT,Toulouse),Torsten Schaub(UniversityofPotsdam),andPhilippeSmets(ULB,Bruxelles). Reviewers Theprogrammecommitteeisverygratefulforallthehardworkcontributed bythereviewers. Hopefully,wehavenotmissedanyonefromthefollowing list:BruceD'Ambrosio,FlorenceBannay,SalemBenferhat,PhilippeBesnard, HuguesBersini,ChristianBorgelt,RachelBourne,StefanBrass,LaurenceCholvy, RogerCooke,AdnanDarwiche,YannisDimopoulos,JurgenDix,DidierDubois, UweEgly,LindavanderGaag,JoergGebhardt,SiegfriedGottwald,RolfHaenni, Jean-YvesJa?ray,RadimJirousek,RuthKempson,U?eKjaerulf,FrankK- wonn,AljoschaKlose,JuergKohlas,PaulKrause,GerhardLakemeyer,Mounia Lalmas,JeromeLang,KimG. Larsen,NorbertLehmann,T. Y. Lin,Thomas Linke,KhalidMellouli,JeromeMengin,J. -J. Ch. Meyer,SanjayModgil,Yves Moinard,Sera?nMoral,DetlefNauck,AnnNicholson,PascalNicolas,Dennis VI Preface Nilsson,KristianG. Olesen,RainerPalm,ZdzislawPawlak,VincentRisch,Regis Sabbadin,CamillaSchwind,PrakashP. Shenoy,MilanStudeny,HeikoTimm, HansTompits,MarcoValtorta,andCeesWitteven. April1999 AnthonyHunterandSimonParsons TableofContents Onthedynamicsofdefaultreasoning GrigorisAntoniou...1 Non-monotonicandparaconsistentreasoning:Frombasicentailmentsto plausiblerelations OferArieliandArnonAvron ...11 AcomparisonofsystematicandlocalsearchalgorithmsforregularCNF formulas Ram'onB'ejarandFelipMany'a...22 Query-answeringinprioritizeddefaultlogic FaridBenhammadi,PascalNicolasandTorstenSchaub...32 Updatingdirectedbeliefnetworks BoutheinaBenYaghlaneandKhaledMellouli...43 Inferringcausalexplanations PhilippeBesnardandMarie-OdileCordier...55 Acritiqueofinductivecausation ChristianBorgeltandRudolfKruse...68 Connectinglexicographicwithmaximumentropyentailment RachelA. BourneandSimonParsons...80 Avoidingnon-groundvariables StefanBruning .. andTorstenSchaub...92 Anchoringsymbolstovisiondatabyfuzzylogic SilviaCoradeschiandAlessandroSa?otti...104 Filteringvsrevisionandupdate:Letusdebate! CorineCossartandCatherineTessier...116 Irrelevanceandindependenceaxiomsinquasi-Bayesiantheory FabioG. Cozman...128 Assessingthevalueofacandidate:Aqualitativepossibilisticapproach DidierDubois,MichelGrabischandHenriPrade...137 VIII TableofContents Learningdefaulttheories B'eatriceDuvalandPascalNicolas...148 Knowledgerepresentationforinductivelearning PeterA. Flach...160 Handling inconsistency e?ciently in the incremental construction of strati?ed beliefbases EricGr'egoire...168 Roughknowledgediscoveryandapplications J. W. GuanandD. A. Bell...179 GradientdescenttrainingofBayesiannetworks FinnV. Jensen...190 Opendefaulttheoriesovercloseddomains:Anextendedabstract MichaelKaminski...201 Shopboteconomics Je?reyO. KephartandAmyR. Greenwald...208 OptimizedalgorithmforlearningBayesiannetworkfromdata F'ediaKhalfallahandKhaledMellouli...221 Mergingwithintegrityconstraints S'ebastienKoniecznyandRam'onPinoP'erez...233 Boolean-likeinterpretationofSugenointegral IvanKramosil...245 AnalternativetooutwardpropagationforDempster-Shaferbelieffunctions NorbertLehmannandRolfHaenni...256 Onbottom-uppre-processingtechniquesforautomateddefaultreasoning ThomasLinkeandTorstenSchaub...2 68 Probabilisitclogicprogrammingundermaximumentropy ThomasLukasiewiczandGabrieleKern-Isberner...279 Lazypropagationandindependenceofcausalin?uence AndersL. MadsenandBruceD'Ambrosio...293 TableofContents IX AMonteCarloalgorithmforcombiningDempster-Shaferbeliefbasedon approximatepre-computation Seraf'?nMoralandAntonioSalmer'on...305 Anextensionofalinguisticnegationmodelallowingustodenynuanced propertycombinations DanielPacholczyk...316 Argumentationandqualitativedecisionmaking SimonParsonsandShawGreen...328 Handling di?erent forms of uncertainty in regression analysis: A fuzzy belief structureapproach SimonPetit-RenaudandThierryDenoeux...340 State recognition in discrete dynamical systems using Petri nets and evidence theory Mich'eleRombaut,ImanJarkassandThierryDenoeux...352 Robotnavigationandmapbuildingwiththeeventcalculus MurrayShanahanandMarkWitkowski...362 Informationfusioninthecontextofstockindexprediction StefanSiekmann,J..orgGebhardtandRudolfKruse...363 Defeasiblegoals LeendertvanderTorre...374 Logicaldeductionusingthelocalcomputationframework NicWilsonandJ'eromeMengin...386 AuthorIndex...397 OntheDynamicsofDefaultReasoning Grigoris Antoniou Gri?thUniversity,QLD4111,Australia UniversityofMacedonia,Thessaloniki,Greece ga@cit. gu. edu. au Abstract. Defaultlogicisaprominentrigorousmethodforreasoning withincompleteinformationbasedonassumptions. Itisastaticreas- ingapproach,inthesensethatitdoesn'treasonaboutchangesandtheir consequences. Ontheotherhand,itsnonmonotonicbehaviourappears whenchangestoadefaulttheoryaremade.

Autonomousagents andmultiagentsystems are computationalsystems inwhich several (semi-)autonomous agents interact each other or work together to p- form some set of tasks or satisfy some set of goals. These systems may involve computationalagents that are homogeneous or heterogeneous, they may involve activities on the part of agents having common goals or distinct goals, and they may involve participation on the part of humans and intelligent agents. The increase of agent research activities can be observed in the series of ICMAS (- ternational Conference of Multi-Agent Systems). In ICMAS'95,209participants were there. At ICMAS'96, the number increased to282, and atICMAS'98, there were 552participants. Thoughwealready haveseveral workshopsinAsia Paci c countries, such as MACC (Multiagent Systems and Cooperative Computation) in Japan from 1991 and Australian Workshop on Distributed Artic ial Int- ligence from 1995, there is not enough interaction so far among the countries compared to Europe and Americas. PRIMA'98 is the First Pacic Rim International Workshop related to - tonomous agents and multiagent systems. The aim of this workshop is to - courage activities in this e ld, and to bring together Pacic Rim researchers withagents and multiagentissues. The objective of this workshopis to assemble theoreticians and practitioners concerned with developing autonomous agents and multiagent systems. Unlikeusual conferences, however, since this is the rst agent-related international workshop in Asia Paci c countries, participation is byinvitationonlyand is limitedto professionals who have made signi cantc- tributionsto thetopicsoftheworkshop. Thecontributionsincludetechnical p- sentations, progress reports and so on.

Past, Present, and Future of Knowledge Acquisition This book contains the proceedings of the 11th European Workshop on Kno- edge Acquisition, Modeling, and Management (EKAW '99), held at Dagstuhl Castle (Germany) in May of 1999. This continuity and the high number of s- missions re?ect the mature status of the knowledge acquisition community. Knowledge Acquisition started as an attempt to solve the main bottleneck in developing expert systems (now called knowledge-based systems): Acquiring knowledgefromahumanexpert. Variousmethodsandtoolshavebeendeveloped to improve this process. These approaches signi?cantly reduced the cost of - veloping knowledge-based systems. However, these systems often only partially ful?lled the taskthey weredevelopedfor andmaintenanceremainedanunsolved problem. This required a paradigm shift that views the development process of knowledge-based systems as a modeling activity. Instead of simply transf- ring human knowledge into machine-readable code, building a knowledge-based system is now viewed as a modeling activity. A so-called knowledge model is constructed in interaction with users and experts. This model need not nec- sarily re?ect the already available human expertise. Instead it should provide a knowledgelevelcharacterizationof the knowledgethat is requiredby the system to solve the application task. Economy and quality in system development and maintainability are achieved by reusable problem-solving methods and onto- gies. The former describe the reasoning process of the knowledge-based system (i. e. , the algorithms it uses) and the latter describe the knowledge structures it uses (i. e. , the data structures). Both abstract from speci?c application and domain speci?c circumstances to enable knowledge reuse.

This volume brings together the work of researchers from various disciplines where aspects of descriptive, mathematical, computational or design knowledge concerning metaphor and analogy, especially in the context of agents, have emerged. The book originates from an international workshop on Computation for Metaphors, Analogy, and Agents (CMAA), held in Aizu, Japan in April 1998.
The 19 carefully reviewed and revised papers presented together with an introduction by the volume editor are organized into sections on Metaphor and Blending, Embodiment, Interaction, Imitation, Situated Mapping in Space and Time, Algebraic Engineering: Respecting Structure, and a Sea-Change in Viewpoints.

A special year like 1999 invites one to draw a balance of what has been achieved in the roughly 30 years of research and development in knowledge based systems (still abbreviated as XPS following the older term "expert systems") and to take a look at th what the future may hold. For the 5 German conference on knowledge-based systems we therefore asked current and former speakers of the four working groups (FG's) in the subdivision of knowledge-based systems (FA 1.5) of the German association of Informatics (GI) to present a survey of and future prospects for their respective fields: knowledge engineering, diagnosis, configuration, and case-based reasoning. An additional 14 technical papers deal with current topics in knowledge-based systems with an equal emphasis on methods and applications. They are selected from more than 50 papers accepted in the 4 parallel workshops of XPS-99: a) Knowledge Management, Organizational Memory and Reuse, b) various fields of applications, c) the traditional PuK Workshop (planning and configuration), and d) the GWCBR (German workshop on case-based reasoning). The other papers presented at these workshops are not included in this volume but are available as internal reports of Wurzburg university together with the exhibition guide that emphasizing tool support for building knowledge based systems."

The Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA) conferences bring together researchers and practitioners from all over the world to exchange ideas, experiences and opinions in a friendly and stimulating environment. The papers are at once a record of what has been achieved and the first steps towards shaping the future of information systems. DEXA covers a broad field, and all aspects of database, knowledge base and related technologies and their applications are represented. Once again there were a good number of submissions: 241 papers were submitted and of these the programme committee selected 103 to be presented. DEXA'99 took place in Florence and was the tenth conference in the series, following events in Vienna, Berlin, Valencia, Prague, Athens, London, Zurich, Toulouse and Vienna. The decade has seen many developments in the areas covered by DEXA, developments in which DEXA has played its part. I would like to express thanks to all the institutions which have actively supported and made possible this conference, namely: * University of Florence, Italy * IDG CNR, Italy * FAW - University of Linz, Austria * Austrian Computer Society * DEXA Association In addition, we must thank all the people who have contributed their time and effort to make the conference possible. Special thanks go to Maria Schweikert (Technical University of Vienna), M. Neubauer and G. Wagner (FAW, University of Linz). We must also thank all the members of the programme committee, whose careful reviews are important to the quality of the conference.

R. MILNE Intelligent Applications Ltd The papers in this volume are the Application Papers presented at ES98, the Eighteenth International Conference of the British Computer Society's Specialist Group on Expert Systems. This year has been yet another "applications" success for the conference with this volume containing seventeen papers describing either deployed applications or emerging applications. All these documented case studies provide clear evidence of the success of AI technology in solving real business problems. Six of these papers were nominated for the Best Application Award during the review process. These nominations were then reviewed by the members of the Programme Committee to select the winning paper. The papers in the volume were subject to refereeing by at least two referees. All papers which were controversial for some reason were discussed in depth by the Application Programme Committee. Ten referees from the industrial and commercial sector and nine referees from the academic sector assisted me in reviewing the papers. The review form asked the referee to score the papers according to a number of dimensions, to rate it overall, and to offer critical comments to me, and to the authors. It also asks the referee to score their expertise in the area of each paper they review. Only reviews from 'expert' referees are used.

R.G.MILES XHP Consulting Ltd, Gloucester. This book is one of two volumes containing papers for presentation at the British Computer Society Expert Systems 98 conference. This is the annual conference of th the BCS Specialist Group on Expert Systems and is in its 18 year. During its lifetime it has established itself as the premier Expert Systems conference in the UK. The conference is attracting an increasing number of papers world-wide and this year in excess of 70% were from research groups outside the UK. This volume includes all papers accepted for the Technical Stream of Expert Systems 98 and presented at the conference in December 1998. The papers within this stream present innovative, new research work. The companion volume, Applications and Innovations in Expert Systems VI, includes all papers accepted for the application stream of the conference. This stream has become the premier European conference on applications of Expert Systems. The papers accepted for presentation within the Technical Stream cover a broad range of research within Expert Systems and fit into four broad categories: ontological frameworks, knowledge base development, classifiers and neuro-fuzzy systems. The award for best Technical paper has been made to David McSherry, from the University of Ulster, for his paper entitled "Strategic Induction of Decision Trees".

This volume contains the papers presented at the Sixteenth International Conference on Automated Deduction (CADE-16), held in Trento, Italy, July 7{10, 1999, and hosted by Istituto Trentino di Cultura { Centro per la ricerca scientic a e tecnologica (ITC-IRST). The year 1999 marks the 25th anniv- sary of CADE. Since their inception in 1974 at Argonne National Laboratory, the CADE conferences have matured into the major forum for presentation of research in all aspects of automated deduction. CADE-16 was one of the conferences participating in the 1999 Federated LogicConference (FLoC). FLoC'99was the second Federated LogicConference; the r st took place in 1996 and was hosted by DIMACS at Rutgers University, NewBrunswick, NJ.TheintentionoftheFederatedLogicConferences istobring together as a synergetic group several conferences that apply logic to computer science. Theother participatingconferences in FLoC'99were theEleventh Int- national Conference on Computer-Aided Veri cation (CAV'99), the Fourteenth IEEE Symposium on Logic inComputer Science (LICS'99), and the Tenth C- ference on Rewriting Techniques and Applications (RTA-99). Eighty-three papers were submitted to CADE-16: 67 regular papers and 16 system descriptions. Each of the submissions was reviewed by at least four programcommitteemembers, andanelectronicprogramcommitteemeeting was held through the Internet. Of the 83 papers, 21 regular papers and 15 system descriptions were accepted. In addition, this volume contains full papers by two of the four invited speakers, Erich Gr] adel and Robert Nieuwenhuis, along with an abstract of Tobias Nipkow's invited lecture. Zohar Manna gave an invited talk in a plenary session with CAV."

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications, DEXA'98, held in Vienna, Austria, in August 1998.
The 81 revised full papers presented were carefully selected from a total of more than 200 submissions. The papers are organized in sections on active databases, object-oriented systems, data engineering, information retrieval, workflow and cooperative systems, spatial and temporal aspects, document management, spatial databases, adaptation and view updates, genetic algorithms, cooperative and distributed environments, interaction and communication, transcation, advanced applications, temporal aspects, oriented systems, partitioning and fragmentation, database queries, data, data warehouses, knowledge discovery and data mining, knowledge extraction, and knowledge base reduction for comprehension and reuse.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of three workshops held in conjunction with the 10th Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Perth, Australia, in December 1997.
The 17 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed for inclusion in the book. The book is divided into sections on formal methods of agency, reasoning agents, communication and coordination, social interaction, and practical issues for distributed artificial intelligence systems.

The first International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) was held ten years ago in Montreal (ITS '88). It was so well received by the international community that the organizers decided to do it again in Montreal four years later, in 1992, and then again in 1996. ITS '98 differs from the previous ones in that this is the first time the conference has been held outside of Montreal, and it's only been two years (not four) since the last one. One interesting aspect of the ITS conferences is that they are not explicitly bound to some organization (e.g., IEEE or AACE). Rather, the founder of these conferences, Claude Frasson, started them as a means to congregate researchers actively involved in the ITS field and provide a forum for presentation and debate of the most currently challenging issues. Thus the unifying theme is science. This year's "hot topics" differ from those in the earlier ITS conferences as they reflect ever changing trends in ITS research. A few of the issues being examined at ITS '98 include: Web based tutoring systems, deploying ITS in the real world, tutoring and authoring tools, architectures, and knowledge structure and representation.