Bernhard Nebel - Böcker

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Spatial Cognition, Spatial Cognition 2014, held in Bremen, Germany, in September 2014. The papers are organized in topical sections on spatial memory;

This is the fourth volume in a series of books dedicated to basic research in spatial cognition. Spatial cognition is a field that investigates the connection between the physical spatial world and the mental world. Philosophers and researchers have p- posed various views concerning the relation between the physical and the mental worlds: Plato considered pure concepts of thought as separate from their physical manifestations while Aristotle considered the physical and the mental realms as two aspects of the same substance. Descartes, a dualist, discussed the interaction between body and soul through an interface organ and thus introduced a functional view that presented a challenge for the natural sciences and the humanities. In modern psych- ogy, the relation between the physical and the cognitive space has been investigated using thorough experiments, and in artificial intelligence we have seen views as diverse as ‘problems can be solved on a representation of the world’ and ‘a representation of the world is not necessary. ’ Today’s spatial cognition work establishes a correspondence between the mental and the physical worlds by studying and exploiting their interaction; it investigates how mental space and spatial “reality” join together in understanding the world and in interacting with it. The physical and representational aspects are equally important in this work. Almost all topics of cognitive science manifest themselves in spatial cognition.

This collection of thoroughly refereed papers presents state-of-the-art research results by well-known researchers on the foundations of knowledge representation and reasoning. In addition, there are two surveys, one by the volume editors intended as a guide to this book and another by Shoham and Cousins on mental attitudes. In total, the volume provides a well-organized report on current research in knowledge representation, which is one of the central subfields of AI. Except the surveys, the papers grew out of a workshop on Theoretical Foundations of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, held in conjunction with the 10th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-92) in Vienna in August 1992.

This volume presents the proceedings of the 18th German Annual Conference on Artificial Intelligence (KI-94), held in Saarbrucken in September 1994. Besides the invited paper "AI approaches towards sensor-based support in road vehicles" by H. -H. Nagel, the book contains 33 full research papers and 12 poster presentations selected from a total of 98 contributions, half of them originating from outside Germany. The papers cover all relevant aspects of AI with a certain focus on knowledge representation and logical foundations of AI; further topics covered are neural network applications, logic programming, natural language, machine learning, and reasoning.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 21st Annual German Conference on Artificial Intelligence, KI-97, held in Freiburg, Germany, in September 1997.The volume presents revised versions of 26 full papers and 10 posters selected from around 70 submissions from more than 15 countries. Also included are three excellent invited contributions by Anthony G. Cohn, Kurt Konolige, and Pat Langley. The papers are organized in topical sections on theorem proving, nonclassical logics, knowledge representation, spatial reasoning, computational linguistics, computer perception and neural nets, and on planning, diagnosis and search.

People have dreamed of machines, which would free them from unpleasant, dull, dirty and dangerous tasks and work for them as servants, for centuries if not millennia. Service robots seem to finally let these dreams come true. But where are all these robots that eventually serve us all day long, day for day? A few service robots have entered the market: domestic and professional cleaning robots, lawnmowers, milking robots, or entertainment robots. Some of these robots look more like toys or gadgets rather than real robots. But where is the rest? This is a question, which is asked not only by customers, but also by service providers, care organizations, politicians, and funding agencies. The answer is not very satisfying. Today’s service robots have their problems operating in everyday environments. This is by far more challenging than operating an industrial robot behind a fence. There is a comprehensive list of technical and scientific problems, which still need to be solved. To advance the state of the art in service robotics towards robots, which are capable of operating in an everyday environment, was the major objective of the DESIRE project (Deutsche Service Robotik Initiative – Germany Service Robotics Initiative) funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under grant no. 01IME01A. This book offers a sample of the results achieved in DESIRE.