This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 30th Annual German Conference on Artificial Intelligence, KI 2007, held in Osnabruck, Germany, September 10-13, 2007.

The 26 revised full papers presented together with 6 invited contributions and 21 posters were carefully reviewed and selected from 81 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on cognition and emotion, semantic Web, analogy, natural language, reasoning, ontologies, spatio-temporal reasoning, machine learning, spatial reasoning, robot learning, classical AI problems, and agents.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of an international seminar on Plan-Based Control of Robotic Agents held at Dagstuhl Castle, Germany in October 2001.The 16 full papers included in the book have gone through two rounds of reviewing and revision and present an up-to-date survey of the state of the art on research in plan-based control of robotic agents. Besides general issues from robotics, agent systems, control, AI planning, algorithmic learning, and problem solving are plan-based high-level control, probabilistic reasoning, plan transformation, and resource adaptive reasoning key topics addressed in the papers.

Robotic agents, such as autonomous office couriers or robot tourguides, must be both reliable and efficient. Thus, they have to flexibly interleave their tasks, exploit opportunities, quickly plan their course of action, and, if necessary, revise their intended activities. This book makes three major contributions to improving the capabilities of robotic agents:  - first, a plan representation method is introduced which allows for specifying flexible and reliable behavior - second, probabilistic hybrid action models are presented as a realistic causal model for predicting the behavior generated by modern concurrent percept-driven robot plans - third, the system XFRMLEARN capable of learning structured symbolic navigation plans is described in detail.

In this book, the author presents a new computational model of forestalling common flaws in autonomous robot behavior. To this end, robots are equipped with structured reactive plans (SRPs) which are concurrent control programs that can not only be interpreted but also be reasoned about and manipulated. The author develops a representation for SRPs in which declarative statements for goals, perceptions, and beliefs make the structure and purpose of SRPs explicit and thereby simplify and speed up reasoning about SRPs and their projections; furthermore a notation is introduced allowing for transforming and manipulating SRPs. Using this notation, a planning system can diagnose and forestall common flaws in robot plans that cannot be dealt with in other planning representations. Finally the language for writing SRPs is extended into a high-level language that can handle both planning and execution actions.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Social Robotics, ICSR 2014, held in Sydney, NSW, Australia, in October 2014. The 41 revised full papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. Amongst others, topics covered are such as interaction and collaboration among robots, humans, and environments; robots to assist the elderly and persons with disabilities; socially assistive robots to improve quality of life; affective and cognitive sciences for socially interactive robots; personal robots for the home; social acceptance and impact in the society; robot ethics in human society and legal implications; context awareness, expectation, and intention understanding; control architectures for social robotics; socially appealing design methodologies; safety in robots working in human spaces; human augmentation, rehabilitation, and medical robots; robot applications in education, entertainment, and gaming; knowledge representation and reasoning frameworks for robot social intelligence; cognitive architectures that support social intelligence for robots; robots in the workplace; human-robot interaction; creative and entertaining robots.

Die Symbolanalyse versteht sich als eine ubergreifende Aufgabe der Geistes-, Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften. Mit der hermeneutisch orientierten Symbolanalyse werden methodische Operationen und Interpretationstechniken von Ethnographie, Grounded Theory und Objektiver Hermeneutik forschungspraktisch verbunden. Dieses einschlagige Grundlagenwerk befasst sich mit der Vielfaltigkeit symbolischer Ausdrucksformen und ihrer interpretativen Erschliessung. Somit handelt es sich von der Anlage her um eine lehrbuchartige Einfuhrung, die sich zugleich als methodisches Manifest eines offenen Forschungsprogramms versteht, an das sich eine Reihe kunftiger Projekte anschliessen sollen.