Second Generation Expert Systems have been a very active field of research during the last years. Much work has been carried out to overcome drawbacks of first generation expert systems. This book presents an overview and new contributions from people who have played a major role in this evolution. It is divided in several sections that cover the main topics of the subject: - Combining Multiple Reasoning Paradigms - Knowledge Level Modelling - Knowledge Acquisition in Second Generation Expert Systems - Explanation of Reasoning - Architectures for Second Generation Expert Systems. This book can serve as a reference book for researchers and students and will also be an invaluable help for practitioners involved in KBS developments.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Social Robotics, ICSR 2012, held in Chengdu, China, in October 2012.
The 66 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on affective and cognitive sciences for socially interactive robots, situated interaction and embodiment, robots to assist the elderly and persons with disabilities, social acceptance of robots and their impact to the society, artificial empathy, HRI through non-verbal communication and control, social telepresence robots, embodiments and networks, interaction and collaboration among robots, humans and environment, human augmentation, rehabilitation, and medical robots I and II.