This book is written for those who are interested in a fonnalization of human reasoning, especially in order to build "intelligent" computer systems. Thus, it is mainly designed for the Artificial Intelligence community, both students and researchers, although it can be useful for people working in related fields like cognitive psychology. The major theme is not Artificial Intelligence applications, although these are discussed throughout in sketch fonn. Rather, the book places a heavy emphasis on the fonnal development of default logic, results and problems. Default logic provides a fonnalism for an important part of human reasoning. Default logic is specifically concerned with common sense reasoning, which has recently been recognized in the Artificial Intelligence literature to be of fundamental importance for knowledge representation. Previously, fonnalized reasoning systems failed in real world environments, though succeeding with an acceptable ratio in well-defined environments. This situation enabled empirical explorations and the design of systems without theoretical justification. In particular, they could not be compared since there was no basis to judge their respective merits. Default logic turned out to be very fruitful by proving the correctness of some of them. We hope that this book will initiate other successful developments in default logic.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th European Conference on Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty, ECSQARU 2001, held in Toulouse, France in September 2001.
The 68 revised full papers presented together with three invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from over a hundred submissions. The book offers topical sections on decision theory, partially observable Markov decision processes, decision-making, coherent probabilities, Bayesian networks, learning causal networks, graphical representation of uncertainty, imprecise probabilities, belief functions, fuzzy sets and rough sets, possibility theory, merging, belief revision and preferences, inconsistency handling, default logic, logic programming, etc.

This book is intended as an introduction to a versatile model for temporal data. It exhibits an original lattice structure on the space of chronicles and proposes new counting approach for multiple occurrences of chronicle occurrences. This book also proposes a new approach for frequent temporal pattern mining using pattern structures.  This book was initiated by the work of Ch. Dousson in the 1990’s.  At that time, the prominent format was Temporal Constraint Networks for which the article by Richter, Meiri and Pearl is seminal. Chronicles do not conflict with temporal constraint networks, they are closely related. Not only do they share a similar graphical representation, they also have in common a notion of constraints in the timed succession of events. However, chronicles are definitely oriented towards fairly specific tasks in handling temporal data, by making explicit certain aspects of temporal data such as repetitions of an event. The notion of chronicle has been applied both for situation recognition and temporal sequence abstraction. The first challenge benefits from the simple but expressive formalism to specify temporal behavior to match in a temporal sequence. The second challenge aims to abstract a collection of sequences by chronicles with the objective to extract characteristic behaviors. This book targets researchers and students in computer science (from logic to data science).  Engineers who would like to develop algorithms based on temporal models will also find this book useful.  

This book is written for those who are interested in a fonnalization of human reasoning, especially in order to build "intelligent" computer systems. Thus, it is mainly designed for the Artificial Intelligence community, both students and researchers, although it can be useful for people working in related fields like cognitive psychology. The major theme is not Artificial Intelligence applications, although these are discussed throughout in sketch fonn. Rather, the book places a heavy emphasis on the fonnal development of default logic, results and problems. Default logic provides a fonnalism for an important part of human reasoning. Default logic is specifically concerned with common sense reasoning, which has recently been recognized in the Artificial Intelligence literature to be of fundamental importance for knowledge representation. Previously, fonnalized reasoning systems failed in real world environments, though succeeding with an acceptable ratio in well-defined environments. This situation enabled empirical explorations and the design of systems without theoretical justification. In particular, they could not be compared since there was no basis to judge their respective merits. Default logic turned out to be very fruitful by proving the correctness of some of them. We hope that this book will initiate other successful developments in default logic.

Emile Durkheim, one of the founding fathers of sociology, has been the subject of many studies. But this book is the first to introduce the individual and collective work of his colleagues and disciples who formed with him the 'French school of sociology'. Such an association of talented scholars was a unique event in the history of sociology and a decisive landmark in the development of the discipline. In this book, examination of the texts of the Durkheimians is combined with analysis of the social and intellectual group attempted to create a new social science. In this respect, the present book is also instructive about the birth and institutionalisation of academic disciplines in general. But studying the work of the Durkheimians goes beyond historical research; the Durkeimians can still offer lessons in the exploration of the territory of sociology, an area in which so much virgin land remains unmapped.