AIICSR '97 (Artificial Intelligence and Information-Control Systems of Robots) is one of the most traditional East-West professional meetings devoted to artifical intelligence (AI) and its applications in robots. The themes of the conference are aimed at the issues of AI theory and applications. The conference is devoted to the development and philosophical reflections of AI, and presents the most important topics, such as knowledge discovery and data mining, and study of context. In addition to robots, AI has created softbots — software robots working in a complex information environment. The WWW has become the most exciting application of AI. Further important topics in this volume include formal modelling of reactive systems, development of parallel and distributed computer architectures, declarative programming, agent societies and other fields, from which theoretical results in computer vision and its applications in robotics deserve special attention.

These proceedings comprise about 50 contributions from experts worldwide. The major themes covered include knowledge-based and expert systems, cognitive modeling, neural networks and AI, image processing and computational geometry, and parallel, distributed and decentralised architecture for AI and robotics.

As robotic systems make their way into standard practice, they have opened the door to a wide spectrum of complex applications. Such applications usually demand that the robots be highly intelligent. Future robots are likely to have greater sensory capabilities, more intelligence, higher levels of manual dexter ity, and adequate mobility, compared to humans. In order to ensure high-quality control and performance in robotics, new intelligent control techniques must be developed, which are capable of coping with task complexity, multi-objective decision making, large volumes of perception data and substantial amounts of heuristic information. Hence, the pursuit of intelligent autonomous robotic systems has been a topic of much fascinating research in recent years. On the other hand, as emerging technologies, Soft Computing paradigms consisting of complementary elements of Fuzzy Logic, Neural Computing and Evolutionary Computation are viewed as the most promising methods towards intelligent robotic systems. Due to their strong learning and cognitive ability and good tolerance of uncertainty and imprecision, Soft Computing techniques have found wide application in the area of intelligent control of robotic systems.

This volume coherently present 24 thoroughly revised full papers accepted for the ECAI-94 Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages. There is currently considerable interest, from both the AI and the mainstream CS communities, in conceptualizing and building complex computer systems as collections of intelligent agents. This book is devoted to theoretical and practical aspects of architectural and language-related design and implementation issues of software agents. Particularly interesting is the comprehensive survey by the volume editors, which outlines the key issues and indicates, via a comprehensive bibliography, topics for further reading. In addition, a glossary of key terms in this emerging field and a comprehensive subject index is included.

These transactions publish research in computer-based methods of computational collective intelligence (CCI) and their applications in a wide range of fields such as the semantic Web, social networks, and multi-agent systems. TCCI strives to cover new methodological, theoretical and practical aspects of CCI understood as the form of intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals (artificial and/or natural). The application of multiple computational intelligence technologies, such as fuzzy systems, evolutionary computation, neural systems, consensus theory, etc., aims to support human and other collective intelligence and to create new forms of CCI in natural and/or artificial systems.

In this 2012 edition of Advances in Knowledge-Based and Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems the latest innovations and advances in Intelligent Systems and related areas are presented by leading experts from all over the world. The 228 papers that are included cover a wide range of topics. One emphasis is on Information Processing, which has become a pervasive phenomenon in our civilization. While the majority of Information Processing is becoming intelligent in a very broad sense, major research in Semantics, Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Engineering supports the domain specific applications that are becoming more and more present in our everyday living. Ontologies play a major role in the development of Knowledge Engineering in various domains, from Semantic Web down to the design of specific Decision Support Systems. Research on Ontologies and their applications is a highly active front of current Computational Intelligence science that is addressed here. Other subjects in this volume are modern Machine Learning, Lattice Computing and Mathematical Morphology.The wide scope and high quality of these contributions clearly show that knowledge engineering is a continuous living and evolving set of technologies aimed at improving the design and understanding of systems and their relations with humans.

The need for a comprehensive survey-type exposition on formal languages and related mainstream areas of computer science has been evident for some years. In the early 1970s, when the book Formal Languages by the second mentioned editor appeared, it was still quite feasible to write a comprehensive book with that title and include also topics of current research interest. This would not be possible anymore. A standard-sized book on formal languages would either have to stay on a fairly low level or else be specialized and restricted to some narrow sector of the field. The setup becomes drastically different in a collection of contributions, where the best authorities in the world join forces, each of them concentrat ing on their own areas of specialization. The present three-volume Handbook constitutes such a unique collection. In these three volumes we present the current state of the art in formallanguage theory. We were most satisfied with the enthusiastic response given to our request for contributions by specialists representing various subfields. The need for a Handbook of Formal Languages was in many answers expressed in different ways: as an easily accessible his torical reference, a general source of information, an overall course-aid, and a compact collection of material for self-study. We are convinced that the final result will satisfy such various needs.