Alun Preece – författare

Frans Coenen University of Liverpool, UK This volume comprises the refereed technical papers presented at AI2003, the Twenty­ third SGAI International Conference on the theory, practice and application of Artificial Intelligence, held in Cambridge in December 2003. 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 An Improved Hybrid Genetic Algorithm: New Results for the Quadratic Assignment Problem by A. Misevicius (Department of Practical Informatics, Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuania). SGAI gratefully acknowledges the long-term sponsorship of Hewlett-Packard Laboratories (Bristol) for this prize, which goes back to the 1980s. This is the twentieth 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 XI. 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 administrator Fiona Hartree and Linsay Turbert.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The papers in this volume are the refereed technical papers presented at ES2000, the Twentieth SGES International Conference on Knowledge Based Systems and Applied Artificial Intelligence, held in Cambridge in December 2000. 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. This is the seventeenth volume in the Research and Development series. The series is essential reading for those who wish to keep up to date with developments in this important field. The Application Stream papers are published as a companion volume under the title Applications and Innovations in Intelligent Systems VIII.

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.

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.

These are the refereed technical papers presented at ES 2002, the Twenty-second SGAI International Conference on Knowledge Based Systems and Applied Artificial Intelligence, held in Cambridge in December 2002. The papers in this volume present developments in the field, divided into sections on machine learning, knowledge representation and reasoning, knowledge acquisition, constraint satisfaction and scheduling, and natural language processing.

Frans Coenen University of Liverpool, UK This volume comprises the refereed technical papers presented at AI2003, the Twenty­ third SGAI International Conference on the theory, practice and application of Artificial Intelligence, held in Cambridge in December 2003. 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 An Improved Hybrid Genetic Algorithm: New Results for the Quadratic Assignment Problem by A. Misevicius (Department of Practical Informatics, Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuania). SGAI gratefully acknowledges the long-term sponsorship of Hewlett-Packard Laboratories (Bristol) for this prize, which goes back to the 1980s. This is the twentieth 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 XI. 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 administrator Fiona Hartree and Linsay Turbert.

The papers collected in this volume were presented at the 6th European C- ference on Case-Based Reasoning (ECCBR 2002) held at The Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, UK. This conference followed a series of very succe- ful well-established biennial European workshops held in Trento, Italy (2000), Dublin, Ireland (1998), Lausanne, Switzerland (1996), and Paris, France (1994), after the initial workshop in Kaiserslautern, Germany (1993). These meetings have a history of attracting ?rst-class European and international researchers and practitioners in the years interleaving with the biennial international co- terpart ICCBR; the 4th ICCBR Conference was held in Vancouver, Canada in 2001. Proceedings of ECCBR and ICCBR conferences are traditionally published by Springer-Verlag in their LNAI series. Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) is an AI problem-solving approach where pr- lems are solved by retrieving and reusing solutions from similar, previously solved problems, and possibly revising the retrieved solution to re?ect di?erences - tween the new and retrieved problems. Case knowledge stores the previously solved problems and is the main knowledge source of a CBR system. A main focus of CBR research is the representation, acquisition and maintenance of case knowledge. Recently other knowledge sources have been recognized as important: indexing, similarity and adaptation knowledge. Signi?cant knowledge engine- ing e?ort may be needed for these, and so the representation, acquisition and maintenance of CBR knowledge more generally have become important.

The papers collected in this volume were presented at the 6th European C- ference on Case-Based Reasoning (ECCBR 2002) held at The Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, UK. This conference followed a series of very succe- ful well-established biennial European workshops held in Trento, Italy (2000), Dublin, Ireland (1998), Lausanne, Switzerland (1996), and Paris, France (1994), after the initial workshop in Kaiserslautern, Germany (1993). These meetings have a history of attracting ?rst-class European and international researchers and practitioners in the years interleaving with the biennial international co- terpart ICCBR; the 4th ICCBR Conference was held in Vancouver, Canada in 2001. Proceedings of ECCBR and ICCBR conferences are traditionally published by Springer-Verlag in their LNAI series. Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) is an AI problem-solving approach where pr- lems are solved by retrieving and reusing solutions from similar, previously solved problems, and possibly revising the retrieved solution to re?ect di?erences - tween the new and retrieved problems. Case knowledge stores the previously solved problems and is the main knowledge source of a CBR system. A main focus of CBR research is the representation, acquisition and maintenance of case knowledge. Recently other knowledge sources have been recognized as important: indexing, similarity and adaptation knowledge. Signi?cant knowledge engine- ing e?ort may be needed for these, and so the representation, acquisition and maintenance of CBR knowledge more generally have become important.

th The 15 International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems (NLDB 2010) took place during June 23–25 in Cardiff (UK). Since the first edition in 1995, the NLDB conference has been aiming at bringing together resear- ers, people working in industry and potential users interested in various applications of natural language in the database and information system area. However, in order to reflect the growing importance of accessing information from a diverse collection of sources (Web, Databases, Sensors, Cloud) in an equally wide range of contexts (- cluding mobile and tethered), the theme of the 15th International Conference on - plications of Natural Language to Information Systems 2010 was "Communicating with Anything, Anywhere in Natural Language. " Natural languages and databases are core components in the development of inf- mation systems. Natural language processing (NLP) techniques may substantially enhance most phases of the information system lifecycle, starting with requirement analysis, specification and validation, and going up to conflict resolution, result pr- essing and presentation. Furthermore, natural language-based query languages and user interfaces facilitate the access to information for all and allow for new paradigms in the usage of computerized services. Hot topics such as information retrieval (IR), software engineering applications, hidden Markov models, natural language interfaces and semantic networks and graphs imply a complete fusion of databases, IR and NLP techniques.