May the Forcing Functions be with You: The Stimulating World of AIED and ITS Research It is my pleasure to write the foreword for Advances in Intelligent Tutoring S- tems. This collection, with contributions from leading researchers in the field of artificial intelligence in education (AIED), constitutes an overview of the many challenging research problems that must be solved in order to build a truly intel- gent tutoring system (ITS). The book not only describes some of the approaches and techniques that have been explored to meet these challenges, but also some of the systems that have actually been built and deployed in this effort. As discussed in the Introduction (Chapter 1), the terms "AIED" and "ITS" are often used int- changeably, and there is a large overlap in the researchers devoted to exploring this common field. In this foreword, I will use the term "AIED" to refer to the - search area, and the term "ITS" to refer to the particular kind of system that AIED researchers build. It has often been said that AIED is "AI-complete" in that to produce a tutoring system as sophisticated and effective as a human tutor requires solving the entire gamut of artificial intelligence research (AI) problems.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the Second Joint International Semantic Technology Conference, JIST 2012, held in Nara, Japan, in December 2012. The 20 full papers and 13 short papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 90 submissions. The regular papers deal with ontology and description logics; RDF and SPARQL; learning and discovery; semantic search; knowledge building; semantic Web application. The in-use track papers cover topics on social semantic Web and semantic search; and the special track papers have linked data in practice and database integration as a topic.

May the Forcing Functions be with You: The Stimulating World of AIED and ITS Research It is my pleasure to write the foreword for Advances in Intelligent Tutoring S- tems. This collection, with contributions from leading researchers in the field of artificial intelligence in education (AIED), constitutes an overview of the many challenging research problems that must be solved in order to build a truly intel- gent tutoring system (ITS). The book not only describes some of the approaches and techniques that have been explored to meet these challenges, but also some of the systems that have actually been built and deployed in this effort. As discussed in the Introduction (Chapter 1), the terms "AIED" and "ITS" are often used int- changeably, and there is a large overlap in the researchers devoted to exploring this common field. In this foreword, I will use the term "AIED" to refer to the - search area, and the term "ITS" to refer to the particular kind of system that AIED researchers build. It has often been said that AIED is "AI-complete" in that to produce a tutoring system as sophisticated and effective as a human tutor requires solving the entire gamut of artificial intelligence research (AI) problems.

This book constitutes the refereed post-proceedings of the Joint International Semantic Technology Conference, JIST 2011, held in Hangzhou, China, in December 2011. This conference is a joint event for regional semantic Web related conferences. JIST 2011 brings together the Asian Semantic Web Conference 2011 and the Chinese Semantic Web Conference 2011. The 21 revised full papers presented together with 12 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 82 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics in disciplines related to semantic technology including applications of the semantic Web, management of semantic Web data, ontology and reasoning, social semantic Web, and user interfaces to the semantic Web.

This volume contains papers from the technical program of the 6th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2009), held from May 31 to June 4, 2009, in Heraklion, Greece. ESWC 2009 presented the latest results in research and applications of Semantic Web technologies. In addition to the technical research track, ESWC 2009 featured a tutorial program, a PhD symposium, a system demo track, a poster track, a number of collocated workshops, and for the ?rst time in the series a Semantic Web in-use track exploring the bene?ts of applying Semantic Web technology in real-life applications and contexts. Thetechnical researchpaper trackreceivedover250submissions.The review process was organized using a two-tiered system, where each submission was reviewed by at least three members of the Program Committee. Vice Program CommitteeChairsorganizedadiscussionbetweenreviewers,collectedadditional reviews when necessary and provided a metareview for each submission. During a physical Program Committee meeting, the Vice Program Committee Chairs together with the Program Chairs selected 45 research papers to be presented at the conference.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the joint 6th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2007, and the 2nd Asian Semantic Web Conference, ASWC 2007, held in Busan, Korea, in November 2007.

The 50 revised full academic papers and 12 revised application papers presented together with 5 Semantic Web Challenge papers and 12 selected doctoral consortium articles were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 257 submitted papers to the academic track and 29 to the applications track. The papers address all current issues in the field of the semantic Web, ranging from theoretical and foundational aspects to various applied topics such as management of semantic Web data, ontologies, semantic Web architecture, social semantic Web, as well as applications of the semantic Web. Short descriptions of the top five winning applications submitted to the Semantic Web Challenge competition conclude the volume.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First Asian Semantic Web Conference, ASWC 2006, held in Beijing, China, in September 2006. The 36 revised full papers and 36 revised short papers presented together with three invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 208 full paper submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections.

PRICAI 2000, held in Melbourne, Australia, is the sixth Pacific Rim Interna tional Conference on Artificial Intelligence and is the successor to the five earlier PRICAIs held in Nagoya (Japan), Seoul (Korea), Beijing (China), Cairns (Aus tralia) and Singapore in the years 1990, 1992, 1994, 1996 and 1998 respectively. PRICAI is the leading conference in the Pacific Rim region for the presenta tion of research in Artificial Intelligence, including its applications to problems of social and economic importance. The objectives of PRICAI are: To provide a forum for the introduction and discussion of new research results, concepts and technologies; To provide practising engineers with exposure to and an evaluation of evolving research, tools and practices; To provide the research community with exposure to the problems of practical applications of AI; and To encourage the exchange of AI technologies and experience within the Pacific Rim countries. PRICAI 2000 is a memorial event in the sense that it is the last one in the 20"" century. It reflects what researchers in this region believe to be promising for their future AI research activities. In fact, some salient features can be seen in the papers accepted. We have 12 papers on agents, while PRICAI 96 and 98 had no more than two or three. This suggests to us one of the directions in which AI research is going in the next century. It is true that agent research provides us with a wide range of research subjects from basic ones to applications."