Castel Ivano, originally built in 1375, is one of many beautiful and impressive castles strategically placed atop hills in Trentino's Valsugana in Northern Italy. It was in this castle on a series of brilliant sunny crisp November days in 1990 that an international group of computer scientists and cognitive scientists met at a workshop to discuss theoretical and applied issues concerning communi cation from an Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science perspective. About forty people, representing nine countries, participated in the workshop, either as speakers, discussants, or observers. The main motivationfor the workshop wasto address the questionofwhether and how current computational approaches to communication can or might be able to accommodate the range of complexities that characterize both human human and human-machine communication. The chapters in this book are based on the papers that were presented at the workshop. They are presented in an order that is determined primarily by the specificity of the topics they address. The initial chapters are more theoretical in nature with an emphasis on formal approaches to communication. The middle chapters focus on particular application issues, such as the generation ofmultimedia documents and the role of planning in building systems to support human-human or human-machine interaction. The final few chapters consider more general issues relating to com munication, such as the influence ofsocial structure on, and the role of affect in communication."

Castel Ivano, originally built in 1375, is one of many beautiful and impressive castles strategically placed atop hills in Trentino's Valsugana in Northern Italy. It was in this castle on a series of brilliant sunny crisp November days in 1990 that an international group of computer scientists and cognitive scientists met at a workshop to discuss theoretical and applied issues concerning communi cation from an Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science perspective. About forty people, representing nine countries, participated in the workshop, either as speakers, discussants, or observers. The main motivationfor the workshop wasto address the questionofwhether and how current computational approaches to communication can or might be able to accommodate the range of complexities that characterize both human human and human-machine communication. The chapters in this book are based on the papers that were presented at the workshop. They are presented in an order that is determined primarily by the specificity of the topics they address. The initial chapters are more theoretical in nature with an emphasis on formal approaches to communication. The middle chapters focus on particular application issues, such as the generation ofmultimedia documents and the role of planning in building systems to support human-human or human-machine interaction. The final few chapters consider more general issues relating to com munication, such as the influence ofsocial structure on, and the role of affect in communication."

The fast-growing interdisciplinary research area of 'language and space' investigates how language and representations of space are linked in information processing systems, like the brain. This is the first book in a new series at the forefront of research in the interfaces between brain, perception, and language. When we use directions in language, such as 'under the tree', how are these directions represented in our minds before we even start speaking, and how are directions expressed in different languages? Considering the way in which language and space are linked has consequences for theories on word meaning (linguistics and philosophy), for the construction of language-to-space interfaces (computer science), for our comprehension of how people use language in different contexts and cultures (psychology and anthropology), and for the way in which we can distinguish between normal and subnormal cognitive processing (neuroscience).

The Self-Organising Map (SOM), with its related techniques, is one of the most popular and powerful concepts for unsupervised pattern recognition and data visualisation. Over 3,000 applications have been reported in the open literature, and many commercial projects employ the SOM as the tool for tackling real-world problems.This volume is a complete record of the Third Workshop on Self-Organising Maps, which brought together the leading international researchers and users for an intensive three-day meeting in Lincoln, UK, and so represents the very latest developments in both theory and application of SOMs and associated approaches.Topics covered include:- Pattern recognition and data clustering;- Unsupervised learning using SOMs and other techniques;- Data visualisation;- Commercial and financial applications;- Multi-dimensional signal processing;- Component and system design and condition monitoring.