Jan Zytkow – författare

Human and machine discovery are gradual problem-solving processes of searching large problem spaces for incompletely defined goal objects. Research on problem solving has usually focused on searching an "instance space" (empirical exploration) and a "hypothesis space" (generation of theories). In scientific discovery, searching must often extend to other spaces as well: spaces of possible problems, of new or improved scientific instruments, of new problem representations, of new concepts, and others. This study focuses especially on the processes for finding new problem representations and new concepts, which are relatively new domains for research on discovery. Scientific discovery has usually been studied as an activity of individual investigators, but these individuals are positioned in a larger social structure of science, being linked by the "blackboard" of open publication (as well as by direct collaboration). Even while an investigator is working alone, the process is strongly influenced by knowledge and skills stored in memory as a result of previous social interactions.In this sense, all research on discovery, including the investigations on individual processes discussed in this book, is social psychology, or even sociology.

This volume contains papers selected for presentation at PKDD'2000, the Fourth European Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in - tabases. The rst meeting was held in Trondheim, Norway, in June 1997, the second in Nantes, France, in September 1998, and the third in Prague, Czech Republic, in September 1999. PKDD 2000 was organized in Lyon, France, on 13{16 September 2000. The conference was hosted by the Equipe de Recherche en Ing enierie des Conna- sances at the Universit e Lumi ere Lyon 2. We wish to express our thanks to the sponsors of the Conference, to the University Claude Bernard Lyon 1, the INSA of Lyon, the Conseil g en eral of the R^one, the R egion Rh^one Alpes, SPSS France, AFIA, and the University of Lyon 2, for their generous support. Knowledge discovery in databases (KDD), also known as data mining, p- vides tools for turning large databases into knowledge that can be used in pr- tice.KDD has been able to grow very rapidly since its emergence a decade ago by drawing its techniques and data mining experiences from a combination of many existing research areas: databases, statistics, mathematical logic, machine learning, automated scienti c discovery, inductive logic programming, arti cial intelligence, visualization, decision science, knowledge management, and high performance computing. The strength of KDD came initially from the value - ded by the creative combination of techniques from the contributing areas.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First European Symposium on Principles of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, PKDD '97, held in Trondheim, Norway, in June 1997.The volume presents a total of 38 revised full papers together with abstracts of one invited talk and four tutorials. Among the topics covered are data and knowledge representation, statistical and probabilistic methods, logic-based approaches, man-machine interaction aspects, AI contributions, high performance computing support, machine learning, automated scientific discovery, quality assessment, and applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third European Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, PKDD'99, held in Prague, Czech Republic in September 1999.The 28 revised full papers and 48 poster presentations were carefully reviewed and selected from 106 full papers submitted. The papers are organized in topical sections on time series, applications, taxonomies and partitions, logic methods, distributed and multirelational databases, text mining and feature selection, rules and induction, and interesting and unusual issues.