AISB91 is the eighth conference organized by the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour. It is not only the oldest regular conference in Europe on AI - which spawned the ECAI conferences in 1982 - but it is also the conference that has a tradition for focusing on research as opposed to applications. The 1991 edition of the conference was no different in this respect. On the contrary, research, and particularly newly emerging research dir ections such as knowledge level expert systems research, neural networks and emergent functionality in autonomous agents, was strongly emphasised. The conference was organized around the following sessions: dis tributed intelligent agents, situatedness and emergence in autonomous agents, new modes of reasoning, the knowledge level perspective, and theorem proving and machine learning. Each of these sessions is discussed below in more detail. DISTRIBUTED INTELLIGENT AGENTS Research in distributed AI is concerned with the problem of how multiple agents and societies of agents can be organized to co-operate and collectively solve a problem. The first paper by Chakravarty (MIT) focuses on the problem of evolving agents in the context of Minsky's society of mind theory. It addesses the question of how new agents can be formed by transforming existing ones and illustrates the theory with an example from game playing. Smieja (GMD, Germany) focuses on the problem of organizing networks of agents which consist internally of neural networks.

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.

A significant part of understanding how people use geographic information and technology concerns human cognition. This book provides the first comprehensive in-depth examination of the cognitive aspects of human-computer interaction for geographic information systems (GIS). Cognitive aspects are treated in relation to individual, group, behavioral, institutional, and cultural perspectives. Extensions of GIS in the form of spatial decision support systems and SDSS for groups are part of the geographic information technology considered. Audience: Geographic information users, systems analysts and system designers, researchers in human-computer interaction will find this book an information resource for understanding cognitive aspects of geographic information technology use, and the methods appropriate for examining this use.

This book is the final outcome of the Eurographics Workshop on Design, Specification and Verification of Interactive Systems, that was held in Bonas, from June 7 to 9, 1995. This workshop was the second of its kind, following the successful first edition in Italy in 1994. The goal of this ongoing series of meetings is to review the state of the art in the domain of tools, notations and methodologies supporting the design of Interactive Systems. This acknowledges the fact that making systems that are friendlier to the user makes the task ever harder to the designers of such systems, and that much research is still needed to provide the appropriate conceptual and practical tools. The workshop was located in the Chateau de Bonas, in the distant countryside of Toulouse, France. Tms location has been selected to preserve the quiet and studious atmosphere that was established in the monastery of Santa Croce at Bocca di Magra for the first edition, and that was much enjoyed by the participants. The conversations initiated during the sessions often lasted till late at night, in the peaceful atmosphere of the Gers landscape.

"This book introduces and explains Higher Order Neural Networks (HONNs) to people working in the fields of computer science and computer engineering, and how to use HONNS in these areas"--Provided by publisher.

KADS is a structured methodology for the development of knowledge based systems which has been adopted throughout the world by academic and industrial professionals alike. KADS approaches development as a modeling activity. Two key characteristics of KADS are the use of multiple models to cope with the complexity of knowledge engineering and the use of knowledge-level descriptions as an immediate model between system design and expertise data. The result is that KADS enables effective KBS construction by building a computational model of desired behavior for a particular problem domain. KADS contains three section: the Theoretical Basis of KADS, Languages and Tools, and Applications. Together they form a comprehensive sourcebook of the how and why of the KADS methodology. KADS will be required reading for all academic and industrial professionals concerned with building knowledge-based systems. It will also be a valuable source for students of knowledge acquisition and KBS. * SPECIAL FEATURES: * KADS is the most widely used commercial structured methodology for KBS development in Europe and is becoming one of the few significant AI exports to the US. * Describes KADS from its Theoretical Basis, through Language and Tool Developments, to real Applications.

Researchers in Artificial Intelligence have traditionally been classified into two categories: the “neaties” and the “scruffies”. According to the scruffies, the neaties concentrate on building elegant formal frameworks, whose properties are beautifully expressed by means of definitions, lemmas, and theorems, but which are of little or no use when tackling real-world problems. The scruffies are described (by the neaties) as those researchers who build superficially impressive systems that may perform extremely well on one particular case study, but whose properties and underlying theories are hidden in their implementation, if they exist at all. As a life-long, non-card-carrying scruffy, I was naturally a bit suspicious when I first started collaborating with Dieter Fensel, whose work bears all the formal hallmarks of a true neaty. Even more alarming, his primary research goal was to provide sound, formal foundations to the area of knowledge-based systems, a traditional stronghold of the scruffies - one of whom had famously declared it “an art”, thus attempting to place it outside the range of the neaties (and to a large extent succeeding in doing so).

This book deals with a key area of industrial robotics ? the automation of small batch assembly. Assembly imparts enormous added value but turns out to be extraordinarily difficult to automate. The work presented here, all from the Centre for Intelligent Systems at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, addresses this issue and shows ways in which the difficulties may be reduced through systematic architectural designs and specific structures for interfacing and controlling sensory-actuation systems. The book develops three main themes: a task-centred approach to robotic assembly, explicit reasoning techniques for fault diagnosis and error handling; and sensor-actuator integration methods. These are vital topics for those concerned with flexible automation and robotics.

The re-use of abstract models of problem solving is a major step towards cost-effective and quality-assured knowledge-based system development. The techniques are discussed in this text.