M.A. Bramer University of Portsmouth, UK This volume comprises the refereed technical papers presented at ES2ooo, the Twentieth SGES International Conference on Knowledge Based Systems and Applied Artificial Intelligence, held in Cambridge in December 2000, together with an invited keynote paper by Professor Austin Tate. The conference was organised by SGES, the British Computer Society Specialist Group on Knowledge Based Systems and Applied Artificial Intelligence. The papers in this volume present new and innovative developments in the field, divided into sections on learning, case-based reasoning, knowledge representation, knowledge engineering, and belief acquisition and planning. The refereed papers begin with a paper entitled 'A Resource Limited Artificial Immune System for Data Analysis', which describes a machine learning algorithm inspired by the natural immune system. This paper was judged to be the best refereed technical paper submitted to the conference. The considerable growth in interest in machine learning in recent years is well reflected in the content of the next three sections, which comprise four papers on case-based reasoning and nine papers on other areas of machine learning. The remaining papers are devoted to knowledge engineering, knowledge representation, belief acquisition and planning, and include papers on such important emerging topics as knowledge reuse and representing the content of complex multimedia documents on the web. This is the seventeenth volume in the Research and Development series. The Application Stream papers are published as a companion volume under the title Applications and Innovations in Intelligent Systems VIII.

The most common document formalisation for text classi?cation is the vector space model founded on the bag of words/phrases representation. The main advantage of the vector space model is that it can readily be employed by classi?cation - gorithms. However, the bag of words/phrases representation is suited to capturing only word/phrase frequency; structural and semantic information is ignored. It has been established that structural information plays an important role in classi?cation accuracy [14]. An alternative to the bag of words/phrases representation is a graph based rep- sentation, which intuitively possesses much more expressive power. However, this representation introduces an additional level of complexity in that the calculation of the similarity between two graphs is signi?cantly more computationally expensive than between two vectors (see for example [16]). Some work (see for example [12]) has been done on hybrid representations to capture both structural elements (- ing the graph model) and signi?cant features using the vector model. However the computational resources required to process this hybrid model are still extensive.

M.A.BRAMER University of Portsmouth, UK This volume comprises the refereed technical papers presented at ES2002, the Twenty-second SGAI International Conference on Knowledge Based Systems and Applied Artificial Intelligence, held in Cambridge in December 2002. The conference was organised by SGAI, the British Computer Society Specialist Group on Artificial Intelligence (previously known as SGES). The papers in this volume present new and innovative developments in the field, divided into sections on Machine Learning, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Knowledge Acquisition, Constraint Satisfaction, Scheduling and Natural Language Processing. This year's prize for the best refereed technical paper was won by a paper entitled Covering the Path Space: A Casebase Analysis for Mobile Robot Path Planning by M Kruusmaa (Department of Mechatronics, Tallinn Technical University, Estonia) and J Willemson (Department of Computer Science, Tartu University, Estonia). SGAI gratefully acknowledges the long-term sponsorship of Hewlett-Packard Laboratories (Bristol) for this prize, which goes back to the 1980s. This is the nineteenth volume in the Research and Development series. The Application Stream papers are published as a companion volume under the title Applications and Innovations in Intelligent Systems X. On behalf of the conference organising committee I should like to thank all those who contributed to the organisation of this year's technical programme, in particular the programme committee members, the referees and our administrators Linsay Turbert and Helen Forster.

M.A. BRAMER University of Portsmouth, UK This volume comprises the refereed technical papers presented at ES200 l, the Twenty-fIrst SGES International Conference on Knowledge Based Systems and Applied ArtifIcial Intelligence, held in Cambridge in December 200 l, together with an invited keynote paper by Professor Derek Sleeman. The conference was organised by SGES, the British Computer Society Specialist Group on Knowledge Based Systems and Applied ArtifIcial Intelligence. The papers in this volume present new and innovative developments in the fIeld, divided into sections on Machine Learning, Constraint Satisfaction, Agents, Knowledge Representation, Knowledge Engineering, and Intelligent Systems. The refereed papers begin with a paper entitled 'Detecting Mismatches Among Experts' Ontologies Acquired Through Knowledge Elicitation', which describes a systematic approach to the analysis of discrepancies within and among experts' ontologies. This paper was judged to be the best refereed technical paper submitted to the conference. The remaining papers are devoted to topics in important areas such as agents, knowledge engineering, knowledge representation, planning and constraint satisfaction, with machine learning again the largest topic covered in terms of the number of papers accepted for publication. This is the eighteenth volume in the Research and Development series. The Application Stream papers are published as a companion volume under the title Applications and Innovations in Intelligent Systems IX.

The field covered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) is multiform and gathers subjects as various as the engineering of knowledge, the automatic treatment of the language, the training and the systems multiagents, and more. This book focuses on subjects including Machine Learning, Reasoning, Neural Networks, Computer Vision, and Multiagent Systems.

Ann Macintosh Napier University, UK The papers in this volume are the refereed application papers presented at ES2001, the Twenty-fIrst SGES International Conference on Knowledge Based Systems and Applied ArtifIcial Intelligence, held in Cambridge in December 200 I. The scope of the application papers has expanded over recent years to cover not just innovative applications using traditional knowledge based systems, but also to include applications demonstrating the whole range of AI technologies. These papers continue to illustrate the maturity of AI as a commercially viable technology to solve real world problems. The papers were subject to refereeing by at least two expert referees. All papers that were in any way controversial were discussed in depth by the Application Programme Committee. For the ES2001 Application Stream, a paper is acceptable even if it describes a system that has not yet been installed, provided the application is original and the paper discusses the kind of things that would help others needing to solve a similar problem. Papers have been selected to highlight critical areas of success - and failure - and to present the benefIts and lessons learnt to other developers. This volume contains sixteen papers describing deployed or emerging applications in a range of diverse areas: business and commerce, engineering, manufacturing, knowledge and information management, and music.

The papers in this volume are the refereed papers presented at AI-2013, the Thirty-third SGAI International Conference on Innovative Techniques and Applications of Artificial Intelligence, held in Cambridge in December 2013 in both the technical and the application streams. They present new and innovative developments and applications, divided into technical stream sections on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining I, Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining II, Intelligent Agents, Representation and Reasoning, and Machine Learning and Constraint Programming, followed by application stream sections on Medical Applications, Applications in Education and Information Science, and AI Applications. The volume also includes the text of short papers presented as posters at the conference. This is the thirtieth volume in the Research and Development in Intelligent Systems series, which also incorporates the twenty-first volume in the Applications and Innovations in Intelligent Systems series. These series are essential reading for those who wish to keep up to date with developments in this important field.

Ann Macintosh Napier University, UK The papers in this volume are the refereed application papers presented at ES2000, the Twentieth SGES International Conference on Knowledge Based Systems and Applied Artificial Intelligence, held in Cambridge in December 2000. The scope of the Application papers has expanded over recent years to cover not just innovative applications using traditional knowledge based systems, but also to include applications demonstrating the whole range of AI technologies. This volume contains thirteen refereed papers describing deployed applications or emerging applications, together with an invited keynote paper by Dr. Daniel Clancy of NASA Ames Research Centre. The papers were subject to refereeing by at least two "expert" referees. All papers which were controversial for some reason were discussed in depth by the Application Programme Committee. For the application stream, a paper is acceptable even if it describes a system which has not yet been installed, provided the application is original and the paper discusses the kinds of things that would help others needing to solve a similar problem. Papers have been selected to highlight critical areas of success (and failure) and to present the benefits and lessons learnt to other developers. Papers this year cover topics as diverse as: KBS for maintaining offshore platforms; Data Mining to predict corporate business failure; integrated AI techniques to support field service engineers; Natural Language applied to the Data Protection Act; knowledge management and the application of neural networks.

This was the ?rst conference of a new series devoted to the e?ective handling of soft issues in the design, development, and operation of computing systems. The conference brought together contributors from a range of relevant disciplines, including arti?cial intelligence, information systems, software engineering, and systems engineering. The keynote speakers, Piero Bonissone, Ray Paul, Sir Tony Hoare, Michael Jackson, and Derek McAuley have interests and experience that collectively span all of these ?elds. Soft issues involve information or knowledge that is uncertain, incomplete, or contradictory. Examples of where such issues arise include: – requirements management and software quality control in software engine- ing, – con?ict or multiple sources information management in information systems, – decision making/prediction in business management systems, – quality control in networks and user services in telecommunications, – traditional human rationality modeling in arti?cial intelligence, – data analysis in machine learning and data mining, – control management in engineering. The concept of dealing with uncertainty became prominent in the arti?cial intel- gence community nearly 20 years ago, when researchers realized that addressing uncertainty was an essential part of representing and reasoning about human knowledge in intelligent systems. The main methodologies that have emerged in this area are soft computing and computational intelligence.

Arti?cial Intelligence is a ?eld with a long history, which is still very much active and developing today. Developments of new and improved techniques, together with the ever-increasing levels of available computing resources, are fueling an increasing spread of AI applications. These applications, as well as providing the economic rationale for the research, also provide the impetus to further improve the performance of our techniques. This further improvement today is most likely to come from an understanding of the ways our systems work, and therefore of their limitations, rather than from ideas ‘borrowed’ from biology. From this understanding comes improvement; from improvement comes further application; from further application comes the opportunity to further understand the limitations, and so the cycle repeats itself inde?nitely. In this volume are papers on a wide range of topics; some describe appli- tions that are only possible as a result of recent developments, others describe new developments only just being moved into practical application. All the - pers re?ect the way this ?eld continues to drive forward. This conference is the 15th in an unbroken series of annual conferences on Industrial and Engineering Application of Arti?cial Intelligence and Expert Systems organized under the auspices of the International Society of Applied Intelligence.