This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the second International Workshop on the Theory and Applications of Formal Argumentation, TAFA 2013, held in Beijing, China, in August 2013. The Workshop was co-located with IJCAI 2013. The 15 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 22 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections such as abstract argumentation frameworks, social abstract argumentation with votes on attacks, a normal form of argumentation frameworks, assumption-based argumentation, argument schemes for normative practical reasoning.

This book is a precious gift that anyone can be happy to receive, have, read, and empower themselves with beneficial knowledge to be healthy and stay healthy as long as possible. To be healthy makes no distinction in religion, race, color, creed, power, well-being, social status or how famous and talented you are or what political party you choose. What's in this book makes no distinction about your choice of love, romance, and type of family, work, career, business, and sexual preference. The goal of this book is to be happy, healthy, live a prosperous life, get along with each other, and tolerate each other, smile, and laugh, say hi, hello, look at each other, and do much more with each other. Once in a while, take time ask yourself, who am I? Why am I here on this earth at this time in this century with all these other people? You can say to yourself, I could've been born in another century with all the other people. But I am here in this century with all the other people with you and me. Let us be healthy, love each other, and live longer.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th Pacific Rim International Workshop on Multi-Agents, PRIMA 2006, held in Guilin, China, in August 2006. The book presents 39 revised full papers and 57 revised short papers together with 4 invited talks, addressing subjects from theoretical and methodological issues to applications. Topics include agent models, agent architectures, agent-oriented software engineering, semantic Web service, collaboration, coordination and negotiation, and more.

This book is part of a two-volume work that constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Life System Modeling and Simulation, LSMS 2007, held in Shanghai, China, September 2007. Coverage includes advanced neural network theory, advanced evolutionary computing theory, ant colonies and particle swarm optimization, intelligent modeling, monitoring, and control of complex nonlinear systems, as well as biomedical signal processing, imaging and visualization.

This book constitutes the ninth official archival publication devoted to RoboCup, documenting presentations at the RoboCup 2005 International Symposium, held in Osaka, Japan, July 2005 alongside the RoboCup Competition. The book presents 34 revised full papers and 38 revised short papers together with two award-winning papers. This is a valuable source of reference and inspiration for those interested in robotics or distributed intelligence, and mandatory reading for the rapidly growing RoboCup community.

This volume constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the Second Workshop on Adaptive and Learning Agents, ALA 2009, held as part of the AAMAS 2009 conference in Budapest, Hungary, in May 2009. The 8 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. They cover a variety of themes: single and multi-agent reinforcement learning, the evolution and emergence of cooperation in agent systems, sensor networks and coordination in multi-resource job scheduling.

In reinforcement learning (RL) problems, learning agents sequentially execute actions with the goal of maximizing a reward signal. The RL framework has gained popularity with the development of algorithms capable of mastering increasingly complex problems, but learning difficult tasks is often slow or infeasible when RL agents begin with no prior knowledge. The key insight behind "transfer learning" is that generalization may occur not only within tasks, but also across tasks. While transfer has been studied in the psychological literature for many years, the RL community has only recently begun to investigate the benefits of transferring knowledge. This book provides an introduction to the RL transfer problem and discusses methods which demonstrate the promise of this exciting area of research. The key contributions of this book are: Definition of the transfer problem in RL domains Background on RL, sufficient to allow a wide audience to understand discussed transfer concepts Taxonomy for transfer methods in RL Survey of existing approaches In-depth presentation of selected transfer methods Discussion of key open questions By way of the research presented in this book, the author has established himself as the pre-eminent worldwide expert on transfer learning in sequential decision making tasks. A particular strength of the research is its very thorough and methodical empirical evaluation, which Matthew presents, motivates, and analyzes clearly in prose throughout the book. Whether this is your initial introduction to the concept of transfer learning, or whether you are a practitioner in the field looking for nuanced details, I trust that you will find this book to be an enjoyable and enlightening read. Peter Stone, Associate Professor of Computer Science