Shakespeare's career-long fascination with the Mediterranean made the association a natural one for this first World Shakespeare Congress of the Third Millennium. The plenary lectures and selected papers in this volume represent some of the best contemporary thought and writing on Shakespeare, in the ranging plenary lectures by Jonathan Bate on Shakespeare's islands and the Muslim connection, Michael Coveney's on the late Sir John Gielgud, Robert Ellrodt's on Shakespeare's sonnets and Montaigne's essays, Stephen Orgel's on Shakespeare's own Shylock, and Marina Warner's on Shakespeare's fairy-tale uses of magic. Also included in the volume's several sections are original pagers selected from special sessions and seminars by other distinguished writers, including Jean E. Howard, Gary Taylor, and Richard Wilson. Tom Clayton is Regents' Professor of English Language and Literature and chair of the Classical Civilization Program at the University of Minnesota. Susan Brock is Head of Library and Information Resources at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon and Honorary Fellow of the Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham. Vicente Fores is Associate Profe

This book presents selected tutorial lectures given at the summer school on Multi-Agent Systems and Their Applications held in Prague, Czech Republic, in July 2001 under the sponsorship of ECCAI and Agent Link. The 20 lectures by leading researchers in the field presented in the book give a competent state-of-the-art account of research and development in the field of multi-agent systems and advanced applications. The book offers parts on foundations of MAS; social behaviour, meta-reasoning, and learning; and applications.

Welcome to the 8th International Workshop on Groupware (CRIWG 2002)! The previous workshops took place in Lisbon, Portugal (1995), Puerto Varas, Chile (1996), El Escorial, Spain (1997), Búzios, Brazil (1998), Cancun, Mexico (1999), Madeira, Portugal (2000), and Darmstadt, Germany (2001). CRIWG workshops follow a simple recipe for success: good papers, a small number of participants, extensive time for lively and constructive discussions, and a high level of cooperation both within and between paper sessions. CRIWG 2002 continued this tradition. CRIWG 2002 attracted 36 submissions from 13 countries, nine of them outside Ibero-America. Each of the 36 articles submitted was reviewed by at least three members of an internationally renowned Program Committee. This year we used a double-blind reviewing process, i. e. , the reviewers did not know who the authors of the papers were. In addition, the reviewers were chosen based on their expertise and we also ensured that they came from countries and institutions not related to those of the paper’s authors. This reviewer assignment worked remarkably well, as indicated by the high average confidence value the reviewers gave their own reviews. This means that papers were usually reviewed by experts in the paper’s topic. As a consequence, reviews were usually quite extensive and contained many suggestions for - provements. I would like to thank all the members of the Program Committee for their hard work, which I am sure contributed to improving the quality of the final articles.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Database Theory, ICDT 2001, held in London, UK, in January 2001. The 26 revised full papers presented together with two invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 75 submissions. All current issues on database theory and the foundations of database systems are addressed. Among the topics covered are database queries, SQL, information retrieval, database logic, database mining, constraint databases, transactions, algorithmic aspects, semi-structured data, data engineering, XML, term rewriting, clustering, etc.

The proceedings of the 2001 Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) Conference. The annual conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) is the flagship conference on neural computation. The conference is interdisciplinary, with contributions in algorithms, learning theory, cognitive science, neuroscience, vision, speech and signal processing, reinforcement learning and control, implementations, and diverse applications. Only about 30 percent of the papers submitted are accepted for presentation at NIPS, so the quality is exceptionally high. These proceedings contain all of the papers that were presented at the 2001 conference.

On May 18-21, 2004, the Max-Planck-Society’s Harnack-Haus in Dahlem, Berlin hosted the international symposium "Exploring the Cosmic Frontier: Astrophysical Instruments for the 21st Century". The symposium was dedicated to exploring the complementarity and synergies between different branches of astrophysical research, by presenting and discussing the fundamental scientific problems that will be addressed in the next few decades.