The launch of Microsoft s Kinect, the first high-resolution depth-sensing camera for the consumer market, generated considerable excitement not only among computer gamers, but also within the global community of computer vision researchers.

The potential of consumer depth cameras extends well beyond entertainment and gaming, to real-world commercial applications such virtual fitting rooms, training for athletes, and assistance for the elderly. This authoritative text/reference reviews the scope and impact of this rapidly growing field, describing the most promising Kinect-based research activities, discussing significant current challenges, and showcasing exciting applications.

Topics and features: presents contributions from an international selection of preeminent authorities in their fields, from both academic and corporate research; addresses the classic problem of multi-view geometry of how to correlate images from different viewpoints to simultaneously estimate camera poses and world points; examines human pose estimation using video-rate depth images for gaming, motion capture, 3D human body scans, and hand pose recognition for sign language parsing; provides a review of approaches to various recognition problems, including category and instance learning of objects, and human activity recognition; with a Foreword by Dr. Jamie Shotton of Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK.

This broad-ranging overview is a must-read for researchers and graduate students of computer vision and robotics wishing to learn more about the state of the art of this increasingly hot topic."

This book contains a selection of papers presented at the International Workshop Machine Learning, Meta-Reasoning and Logics held in Hotel de Mar in Sesimbra, Portugal, 15-17 February 1988. All the papers were edited afterwards. The Workshop encompassed several fields of Artificial Intelligence: Machine Learning, Belief Revision, Meta-Reasoning and Logics. The objective of this Workshop was not only to address the common issues in these areas, but also to examine how to elaborate cognitive architectures for systems capable of learning from experience, revising their beliefs and reasoning about what they know. Acknowledgements The editing of this book has been supported by COST-13 Project Machine Learning and Knowledge Acquisition funded by the Commission o/the European Communities which has covered a substantial part of the costs. Other sponsors who have supported this work were Junta Nacional de lnvestiga ao Cientlfica (JNICT), lnstituto Nacional de lnvestiga ao Cientlfica (INIC), Funda ao Calouste Gulbenkian. I wish to express my gratitude to all these institutions. Finally my special thanks to Paula Pereira and AnaN ogueira for their help in preparing this volume. This work included retyping all the texts and preparing the camera-ready copy. Introduction 1 1. Meta-Reasoning and Machine Learning The first chapter is concerned with the role meta-reasoning plays in intelligent systems capable of learning. As we can see from the papers that appear in this chapter, there are basically two different schools of thought.

This book contains a selection of papers presented at the International Workshop Machine Learning, Meta-Reasoning and Logics held in Hotel de Mar in Sesimbra, Portugal, 15-17 February 1988. All the papers were edited afterwards. The Workshop encompassed several fields of Artificial Intelligence: Machine Learning, Belief Revision, Meta-Reasoning and Logics. The objective of this Workshop was not only to address the common issues in these areas, but also to examine how to elaborate cognitive architectures for systems capable of learning from experience, revising their beliefs and reasoning about what they know. Acknowledgements The editing of this book has been supported by COST-13 Project Machine Learning and Knowledge Acquisition funded by the Commission o/the European Communities which has covered a substantial part of the costs. Other sponsors who have supported this work were Junta Nacional de lnvestiga ao Cientlfica (JNICT), lnstituto Nacional de lnvestiga ao Cientlfica (INIC), Funda ao Calouste Gulbenkian. I wish to express my gratitude to all these institutions. Finally my special thanks to Paula Pereira and AnaN ogueira for their help in preparing this volume. This work included retyping all the texts and preparing the camera-ready copy. Introduction 1 1. Meta-Reasoning and Machine Learning The first chapter is concerned with the role meta-reasoning plays in intelligent systems capable of learning. As we can see from the papers that appear in this chapter, there are basically two different schools of thought.

Nonmonotonic reasoning in its broadest sense is reasoning to conclusions on the basis of incomplete information. Given more information, previously drawn inferences may be retracted. Commonsense reasoning has a nonmonotonic component; it has been argued that almost all commonsense inferences are of this sort. From the end of the 1980s to the present there has been an explosion in research in nonmonotonic reasoning. It is now possible to understand more clearly the properties of the major formalisms from a metatheoretical point of view, the relationships among the formalisms and their connection to independently developed proof methods. The goal of this monograph is to make this understanding more accessible.