Rob Milne was a remarkable man. He died of a heart attack on the 5th of June 2005 while climbing Mount Everest in Nepal. Milne (48) lived an active life: combining his three ‘careers’ seemingly effortlessly. He was a hi-tech entrepreneur, an AI researcher and a passionate mountaineer. Mount Everest was last on his list of the highest summits on each continent. He was only 400 meters from the top when he died. This publication commemorates and celebrates the life of Rob Milne. It covers all facets of Rob Milne's life and contains contributions by the people who have known him well and pay tribute to his life and his legacy. Rob Milne is survived by his wife Val and his two children Alex and Rosemary. After he died, his wife said in a radio interview: “Rob died at the top, doing what he loved.”

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.

STAIRS 2006 is the third European Starting AI Researcher Symposium, an international meeting aimed at AI researchers, from all countries, at the beginning of their career: PhD students or people holding a PhD for less than one year. The topics of the papers included range from traditional AI areas to AI applications, such as Agents, Automated Reasoning, Belief Revision, Case-based Reasoning, Constraints, Data Mining & Information Extraction, Genetic Algorithms, Human Computer Interaction, Interactive Sensory Systems (Speech, Multi-Model Processing), Knowledge Representation, Logic Programming, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Neural Networks, Nonmonotonic Reasoning, Planning & Scheduling, Reasoning about Action and Change, Robotics, Search, Semantic Web, Spatial & Temporal Reasoning and Uncertainty.

In the summer of 1956, John McCarthy organized the famous Dartmouth Conference which is now commonly viewed as the founding event for the field of Artificial Intelligence. During the last 50 years, AI has seen a tremendous development and is now a well-established scientific discipline all over the world. Also in Europe AI is in excellent shape, as witnessed by the large number of high quality papers in this publication. In comparison with ECAI 2004, there’s a strong increase in the relative number of submissions from Distributed AI / Agents and Cognitive Modelling. Knowledge Representation & Reasoning is traditionally strong in Europe and remains the biggest area of ECAI-06. One reason the figures for Case-Based Reasoning are rather low is that much of the high quality work in this area has found its way into prestigious applications and is thus represented under the heading of PAIS.

Software is the essential enabler for the new economy and science. It creates new markets and new directions for a more reliable, flexible, and robust society. It empowers the exploration of our world in ever more depth. However, software often falls short behind our expectations. Current software methodologies, tools and techniques remain expensive and not yet reliable for a highly changeable and evolutionary market. Many approaches have been proven only as case-by-case oriented methods. This book presents a number of new trends and theories in the direction in which we believe software science and engineering may develop to transform the role of software and science in tomorrow's information society. This publication is an attempt to capture the essence of a new state-of-art in software science and its supporting technology. It also aims at identifying the challenges such a technology has to master.

Researchers in areas such as artificial intelligence, formal and computational linguistics, biomedical informatics, conceptual modeling, knowledge engineering and information retrieval have come to realize that a solid foundation for their research calls for serious work in ontology, understood as a general theory of the types of entities and relations that make up their respective domains of inquiry. In all these areas, attention is now being focused on the content of information rather than on just the formats and languages used to represent information. The clearest example of this development is provided by the many initiatives growing up around the project of the Semantic Web. And, as the need for integrating research in these different fields arises, so does the realization that strong principles for building well-founded ontologies might provide significant advantages over ad hoc, case-based solutions. The tools of formal ontology address precisely these needs, but a real effort is required in order to apply such philosophical tools to the domain of information systems. ontological questions which call for further philosophical investigations. The purpose of FOIS is to provide a forum for genuine interdisciplinary exchange in the spirit of a unified effort towards solving the problems of ontology, with an eye to both theoretical issues and concrete applications. This book contains a wide range of areas, all of which are important to the development of formal ontologies.

Based on the theme of the use of computers for supporting collaborative learning, this book includes contributions that aim to bridge both research tracks, the one focusing on interactions and the other on contents: the pedagogical use of digital portfolios, both for promoting individual reflections and for scaffolding group interactions.

This book presents recent advances in fault diagnosis strategies for complex dynamic systems. Its impetus derives from the need for an overview of the challenges of the fault diagnosis technique, especially for those demanding systems that require reliability, availability, maintainability and safety to ensure efficient operations. Moreover, the need for a high degree of tolerance with respect to possible faults represents a further key point, primarily for complex systems, as modeling and control are inherently challenging, and maintenance is both expensive and safety-critical. Diagnosis and Fault-tolerant Control 1 also presents and compares different diagnosis schemes using established case studies that are widely used in related literature. The main features of this book regard the analysis, design and implementation of proper solutions for the problems of fault diagnosis in safety critical systems. The design of the considered solutions involves robust data-driven, model-based approaches.

Argumentation has evolved from its original study primarily by philosophers to emerge in the last ten years as an important sub-discipline of Artificial Intelligence. There have been significant contributions resulting from this, including approaches to modelling and analysis of defeasible reasoning, formal bases for negotiation and dialogue processes in multiagent systems, and the use of argumentation theory in AI applications whose nature is not best described through traditional logics, e.g. legal reasoning, evaluation of conflicting beliefs, etc. The process of interpreting and exploiting classical treatments of Argumentation Theory in effective computational terms has led to a rich interchange of ideas among researchers from disciplines such as Philosophy, Linguistics, AI and Economics. While work over recent years has done much to consolidate diverse contributions to the field, many new concerns have been identified and form the basis of current research. The papers in this volume, presented as part of the 1st International Conference on Computational Model of Arguments (COMMA) in September 2006, give a valuable overview of on-going research issues and concerns within this field.