There is generalagreementthat the quality of Machine Learning and Kno- edgeDiscoveryoutputstronglydependsnotonlyonthequalityofsourcedata andsophisticationoflearningalgorithms, butalsoonadditional, task/domain speci?c input provided by domain experts for the particular session. There is however less agreement on whether, when and how such input can and should e?ectively be formalized and reused as explicit prior knowledge. In the ?rst ofthe two parts into which the book is divided, we aimed to - vestigate current developments and new insights on learning techniques that exploit prior knowledge and on promising application areas. With respect to application areas, experiments on bio-informatics / medical and Web data environments are described. This part comprises a selection of extended c- tributionstothe workshopPrior Conceptual Knowledge inMachine Learning and Knowledge Discovery (PriCKL), held at ECML/PKDD 2007 18th - ropean Conference on Machine Learning and 11th European Conference on PrinciplesandPracticeofKnowledgeDiscoveryinDatabases).Theworkshop is part of the activities of the "SEVENPRO - Semantic Virtual Engineering for Product Design" project of the European 6th Framework Programme. The second part of the book has been motivated by the speci?cation of Web 2.0. We observe Web 2.0 as a powerful means of promoting the Web as a social medium, stimulating interpersonal communication and fostering the sharing of content, information, semantics and knowledge among people. Chapters are authored by participants to the workshop Web Mining 2.0, heldatECML/PKDD2007.Theworkshophostedresearchontheroleofweb mininginandfortheWeb2.0.Itispartoftheactivitiesoftheworkinggroups "UbiquitousData-InteractionandDataCollection"and"HumanComputer Interaction and Cognitive Modelling" of the Coordination Action "KDubiq - Knowledge Discovery in Ubiquitous Environments" of the European 6th Framework Programme.

There is generalagreementthat the quality of Machine Learning and Kno- edgeDiscoveryoutputstronglydependsnotonlyonthequalityofsourcedata andsophisticationoflearningalgorithms,butalsoonadditional,task/domain speci?c input provided by domain experts for the particular session. There is however less agreement on whether, when and how such input can and should e?ectively be formalized and reused as explicit prior knowledge. In the ?rst ofthe two parts into which the book is divided, we aimed to - vestigate current developments and new insights on learning techniques that exploit prior knowledge and on promising application areas. With respect to application areas, experiments on bio-informatics / medical and Web data environments are described. This part comprises a selection of extended c- tributionstothe workshopPrior Conceptual Knowledge inMachine Learning and Knowledge Discovery (PriCKL), held at ECML/PKDD 2007 18th - ropean Conference on Machine Learning and 11th European Conference on PrinciplesandPracticeofKnowledgeDiscoveryinDatabases).Theworkshop is part of the activities of the "SEVENPRO - Semantic Virtual Engineering for Product Design" project of the European 6th Framework Programme. The second part of the book has been motivated by the speci?cation of Web 2.0. We observe Web 2.0 as a powerful means of promoting the Web as a social medium, stimulating interpersonal communication and fostering the sharing of content, information, semantics and knowledge among people. Chapters are authored by participants to the workshop Web Mining 2.0, heldatECML/PKDD2007.Theworkshophostedresearchontheroleofweb mininginandfortheWeb2.0.Itispartoftheactivitiesoftheworkinggroups "UbiquitousData-InteractionandDataCollection"and"HumanComputer Interaction and Cognitive Modelling" of the Coordination Action "KDubiq - Knowledge Discovery in Ubiquitous Environments" of the European 6th Framework Programme.

This three-volume set LNAI 8188, 8189 and 8190 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the European Conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases, ECML PKDD 2013, held in Prague, Czech Republic, in September 2013. The 111 revised research papers presented together with 5 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 447 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on reinforcement learning; Markov decision processes; active learning and optimization; learning from sequences; time series and spatio-temporal data; data streams; graphs and networks; social network analysis; natural language processing and information extraction; ranking and recommender systems; matrix and tensor analysis; structured output prediction, multi-label and multi-task learning; transfer learning; bayesian learning; graphical models; nearest-neighbor methods; ensembles; statistical learning; semi-supervised learning; unsupervised learning; subgroup discovery, outlier detection and anomaly detection; privacy and security; evaluation; applications; and medical applications.

This three-volume set LNAI 8188, 8189 and 8190 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the European Conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases, ECML PKDD 2013, held in Prague, Czech Republic, in September 2013. The 111 revised research papers presented together with 5 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 447 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on reinforcement learning; Markov decision processes; active learning and optimization; learning from sequences; time series and spatio-temporal data; data streams; graphs and networks; social network analysis; natural language processing and information extraction; ranking and recommender systems; matrix and tensor analysis; structured output prediction, multi-label and multi-task learning; transfer learning; bayesian learning; graphical models; nearest-neighbor methods; ensembles; statistical learning; semi-supervised learning; unsupervised learning; subgroup discovery, outlier detection and anomaly detection; privacy and security; evaluation; applications; and medical applications.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Inductive Logic Programming, ILP 2012, held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, in September 2012. The 18 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 41 submissions. The papers cover the following topics: propositionalization, logical foundations, implementations, probabilistic ILP, applications in robotics and biology, grammatical inference, spatial learning and graph-based learning.

The 18th International Conference on Inductive Logic Programming was held in Prague, September 10-12, 2008. ILP returned to Prague after 11 years, and it is tempting to look at how the topics of interest have evolved during that time. The ILP community clearly continues to cherish its beloved ?rst-order logic representation framework. This is legitimate, as the work presented at ILP 2008 demonstrated that there is still room for both extending established ILP approaches (such as inverse entailment) and exploring novel logic induction frameworks (such as brave induction). Besides the topics lending ILP research its unique focus, we were glad to see in this year's proceedings a good n- ber of papers contributing to areas such as statistical relational learning, graph mining, or the semantic web. To help open ILP to more mainstream research areas, the conference featured three excellent invited talks from the domains of the semantic web (Frank van Harmelen), bioinformatics (Mark Craven) and cognitive sciences (Josh Tenenbaum). We deliberately looked for speakers who are not directly involved in ILP research. We further invited a tutorial on stat- tical relational learning (Kristian Kersting) to meet the strong demand to have the topic presented from the ILP perspective. Lastly, Stefano Bertolo from the European Commission was invited to give a talk on the ideal niches for ILP in the current EU-supported research on intelligent content and semantics.

This three-volume set LNAI 8188, 8189 and 8190 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the European Conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases, ECML PKDD 2013, held in Prague, Czech Republic, in September 2013. The 111 revised research papers presented together with 5 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 447 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on reinforcement learning; Markov decision processes; active learning and optimization; learning from sequences; time series and spatio-temporal data; data streams; graphs and networks; social network analysis; natural language processing and information extraction; ranking and recommender systems; matrix and tensor analysis; structured output prediction, multi-label and multi-task learning; transfer learning; bayesian learning; graphical models; nearest-neighbor methods; ensembles; statistical learning; semi-supervised learning; unsupervised learning; subgroup discovery, outlier detection and anomaly detection; privacy and security; evaluation; applications; and medical applications.