Joachim Hertzberg - Böcker

Planning - formulating a course of action - and relatedfields like scheduling or reasoning about action have a longresearch tradition in artificial intelligence. However,there seems to have been a communications problem amongEuropean planners, with many of them unaware of good workdone in neighboring countries. This volume contains ten papers presented at the EuropeanWorkshop on Planning held in Sankt Augustin, Germany, March1991. The purpose of the workshop was to provide a forum forpresenting work in planning and related areas done byEuropean researchers. The papers provide a snapshot ofplanning research at present being done in Europe. Theydescribe work in the areas of plan generation, logicalapproaches to planning, planning under uncertainty, planningwith time, and semantics of plans.

Much of A1 research is about problem-solving strategies, and several techniques have been crystalized. One such technique is constraint satisfaction or reasoning based on relations. Constraint-based reasoning is used to solve a wide field of problems, and recently constraint techniques have been incorporated into logic programming languages, yielding a whole new field of research and application: constraint logic programming. Constraint satisfaction techniques have become part of almost all introductory books on A1. This monograph is about constraint satisfaction. It differs from others in that it presents all approaches under a common, generalizing view: dynamic constraints. This new way of viewing constraints provides insights about the different approaches, and forms a very practical basis for teaching constraint-based reasoning. A uniform view of the constraint world is also a good basis for constraint research. This text is not intended to be a self-contained textbook on constraint-based reasoning, but rather a coherent text on an interesting view of the field.

The 30th Annual German Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence (KI-2007) took place in the University of Osnabru ¨ck, September 10–13, 2007. In this volume, you will ?nd papers or abstracts of its six invited talks, 25 full papers, and 21 posters. The full papers were selected from 81 submissions, resulting in an acceptance rate of 32%. AsusualataKIconference,anentiredaywasreservedfortargetedworkshops – ten of them this year – and two tutorials. They are not coveredin this volume, but the conference Web sitewww.ki2007.uos.de will keep providing information and references to their contents. Some topic clusters are apparent in the overall conference program, which re?ect recent trends in AI research, convolved with foci of work in Germany and Europe. Examples are learning and data mining, robotics and perception, knowledge representation and reasoning, planning and search – all of them including a healthy number of approaches dealing with uncertainty, contradiction, and incompleteness of knowledge. All in all, KI-2007 provided a cross section of modern AI research and application work. KI-2007 also constituted a “small anniversary,” being the 30th exemplar of its kind. The invited talk by Wolfgang Bibel (accompanied by a paper in this volume) picked up on that occasion by recalling what the ?eld of automated deduction was like 30 and more years ago – in general, and in Germany. He also paid homage to Gerd Veenker, who organizedthe ?rst KI conference (which had a di?erent name at the time) in 1975 and whose ?eld of research was deduction.

Today's mobile robot perception is insu?cient for acting goal-directedly in - constrained, dynamic everyday environments like a home, a factory, or a city. Subject to restrictions in bandwidth, computer power, and computation time, a robot has to react to a wealth of dynamically changing stimuli in such - vironments, requiring rapid, selective attention to decisive, action-relevant - formation of high current utility. Robust and general engineering methods for e?ectively and e?ciently coupling perception, action, and reasoning are unava- able. Interesting performance, if any, is currently only achieved by sophisticated robot programming exploiting domain features and specialties, which leaves - dinary users no chance of changing how the robot acts. The latter facts are high barriers for introducing, for example, service robots into human living or work environments. In order to overcome these barriers, additonal R&D e?orts are required. The European Commission is undert- ing a determined e?ort to fund related basic, inter-disciplinary research in a line of Strategic Objectives, including the Cognitive Systems calls in their 6th Framework Programme (FP6, [1]), and continuing in the 7th Framework P- gramme.OneofthefundedCognitiveSystemsprojectsisMACS("multi-sensory autonomous cognitive systems interacting with dynamic environments for p- ceiving and using a?ordances").