This volume contains 6 invited lectures and 13 submitted contributions to the scientific programme of the international workshop Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence Research, FAIR '91, held at Smolenice Castle, Czechoslovakia, September 8-12, 1991, under the sponsorship of the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence, ECCAI. FAIR'91, the first of an intended series of international workshops, addresses issues which belong to the theoretical foundations of artificial intelligence considered as a discipline focused on concise theoretical description of some aspects of intelligence by toolsand methods adopted from mathematics, logic, and theoretical computer science. The intended goal of the FAIR workshops is to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and results in a domain where theoretical models play an essential role. It is felt that such theoretical studies, their development and their relations to AI experiments and applications have to be promoted in the AI research community.

This volume contains the elaborated and harmonized versions of seven lectures given at the first Advanced Course in Artificial Intelligence, held in Vignieu, France, in July 1985. Most of them were written in tutorial form; the book thus provides an extremely valuable guide to the fundamental aspects of AI. In the first part, Delgrande and Mylopoulos discuss the concept of knowledge and its representation. The second part is devoted to the processing of knowledge. The contribution by Huet shows that both computation and inference or deduction are just different aspects of the same phenomenon. The chapter written by Stickel gives a thorough and knowledgeable introduction to the most important aspects of deduction by some form of resolution. The kind of reasoning that is involved in inductive inference problem solving (or programming) from examples, and in learning, is covered by Biermann. The tutorial by Bibel covers the more important forms of knowledge processing that might play a significant role in common sense reasoning. The third part of the book focuses on logic programming and functional programming. Jorrand presents the language FP2, where term rewriting forms the basis for the semantics of both functional and parallel programming. In the last chapter, Shapiro gives an overview of the current state of concurrent PROLOG.