The annual Irish Conferences on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science have become the major forum in Ireland for the discussion of various aspects of artificial intelligence. Their aim is to provide a forum where researchers can present their current work, and where industrial and commercial users can relate this work to their own practical needs and experiences. Although the emphasis of the conferences is on Irish research, there are also important contributions from Europe, Australia, Canada, and the USA. This volume is based on the proceedings of the Fifth Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science (AICS'92), which was held at the University of Limerick, Ireland, from 10-11 September 1992. The conference was divided into 6 sessions, covering knowledge representation, cognitive foundations, natural language 1 and 2, learning and expert systems, and nov§ el aspects of artificial intelligence and cognitive science. Because of the high number of papers submitted to the conference, a poster session was run in addition to the plenary sessions. Each paper presented at the poster session is represented in this volume by a four page abstract. Among the specific topics covered in this volume are: a model-based theory of conceptual combination; the nature and development of reasoning strategies; word recognition as a parsing problem; a knowledge-based autonomous vehicle system for emergency management support; the construction and use of scope neutral discourse entities; computer-based iconic communication; and exceptions in multiple inheritance systems. AI and Cognitive Science '92 provides a comprehensive record of current research into this important field. It will be of interest to researchers, lecturers and postgraduate students in a variety of disciplines related to artificial intelligence and cognitive science.

The book focuses on a conceptual flaw in contemporary artificial intelligence and cognitive science. Many people have discovered diverse manifestations and facets of this flaw, but the central conceptual impasse is at best only partially perceived. Its consequences, nevertheless, visit themselves asdistortions and failures of multiple research projects - and make impossible the ultimate aspirations of the fields. The impasse concerns a presupposition concerning the nature of representation - that all representation has the nature of encodings: encodingism. Encodings certainly exist, butencodingism is at root logically incoherent; any programmatic research predicted on it is doomed too distortion and ultimate failure. The impasse and its consequences - and steps away from that impasse - are explored in a large number of projects and approaches. These include SOAR, CYC, PDP, situated cognition, subsumption architecture robotics, and the frame problems - a general survey of the current research in AI and Cognitive Science emerges. Interactivism, an alternative model of representation, is proposed and examined.

This volume features the complete text of all regular papers, posters, and summaries of symposia presented at the 14th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.

Winner of the Wolf Prize for his contribution to our understanding of the universe, Penrose takes on the question of whether artificial intelligence will ever approach the intricacy of the human mind. 144 illustrations.

This book is the proceedings of a workshop held at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh in August 1993. The central theme of the workshop was rules in database systems, and the papers presented covered a range of different aspects of database rule systems. These aspects are reflected in the sessions of the workshop, which are the same as the sections in this proceedings: Active Databases Architectures Incorporating Temporal Rules Rules and Transactions Analysis and Debugging of Active Rules Integrating Graphs/Objects with Deduction Integrating Deductive and Active Rules Integrity Constraints Deductive Databases The incorporation of rules into database systems is an important area of research, as it is a major component in the integration of behavioural information with the structural data with which commercial databases have traditionally been associated. This integration of the behavioural aspects of an application with the data to which it applies in database systems leads to more straightforward application development and more efficient processing of data. Many novel applications seem to need database systems in which structural and behavioural information are fully integrated. Rules are only one means of expressing behavioural information, but it is clear that different types of rule can be used to capture directly different properties of an application which are cumbersome to support using conventional database architectures. In recent years there has been a surge of research activity focusing upon active database systems, and this volume opens with a collection of papers devoted specifically to this topic.

Foundations of Constraint Satisfaction discusses the foundations of constraint satisfaction and presents algorithms for solving constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs). Most of the algorithms described in this book are explained in pseudo code, and sometimes illustrated with Prolog codes (to illustrate how the algorithms could be implemented). Comprised of 10 chapters, this volume begins by defining the standard CSP and the important concepts around it and presenting examples and applications of CSPs. The reader is then introduced to the main features of CSPs and CSP solving techniques (problem reduction, searching, and solution synthesis); some of the most important concepts related to CSP solving; and problem reduction algorithms. Subsequent chapters deal with basic control strategies of searching which are relevant to CSP solving; the significance of ordering the variables, values and compatibility checking in searching; specialized search techniques which gain their efficiency by exploiting problem-specific features; and stochastic search approaches (including hill climbing and connectionist approaches) for CSP solving. The book also considers how solutions can be synthesized rather than searched for before concluding with an analysis of optimization in CSPs. This monograph can be used as a reference by artificial intelligence (AI) researchers or as a textbook by students on advanced AI courses, and should also help knowledge engineers apply existing techniques to solve CSPs or problems which embed CSPs.

This volume features the complete text of all regular papers, posters, and summaries of symposia presented at the 15th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.

The International Workshop on Temporal Databases held in Zurich, Switzerland, 17-18 September 1995 brought together researchers from academic and industrial institutions with database practitioners interested in keeping up with the state-of-the-art developments in the management of temporal data. A previous workshop in Arlington, Texas in June 1993 focused on the development of an infrastructure that would spur the development of commercial implementations of many of the generally agreed-upon features of temporal database management that have emerged from the temporal database research community over more than a decade of research. This ARP AlNSF-sponsored Arlington workshop saw the formation of the TSQL2 Language Design Committee, which led to the development of the recently completed TSQL2 Language Specification, and also created a "consensus" glossary of temporal database terminology and a test suite of temporal database queries. The Zurich workshop was conceived from the outset to be universal in scope, and international in participation. The Call for Papers sought to evoke the highest quality and most up-to-date temporal database research from around the world. Mindful of the important work accomplished by the previous workshop, the Call also specifically sought out research papers and panels that would comment and build upon the widely publicized results from Arlington. These proceedings contain the papers that were selected for presentation at the International Workshop, on Temporal Databases held in Zurich, Switzerland on 17-18 September 1995.

The Sixth Refinement Workshop took place at City University in London from 5th to 7th January 1994. The present volume includes all of the papers which were submitted and accepted for presentation, together with two papers by invited speakers. The workshops in the series have generally occurred at one year intervals but in this last case a two year period had elapsed. These workshops have established themselves as an important event in the calendar for all those who are interested in progress in the underlying theory of refinement and in the take-up by industry of the methods supported by that theory. One of the proposed themes of the sixth workshop was the reporting of successful adoption in industry of rigorous software development methods. The programme committee was perhaps slightly disappointed by the response from industry to the call in this respect. However, the recent period could be characterised as one of consolidation, when those companies which have made the decision that formal development methods are important to their business have been adopting them where appropriate and finding them to be worthwhile. On the other hand,. the difficult economic climate which exists in most parts of the developed world is perhaps not the context within which companies still dubious about the benefits are goil'\g to opt for making major changes in their working practices.