John A. ]. [Campbell – författare

Thelma is a troubled young woman in Townsville in the 1980s. A man comes to her aid and before long they are married. They travel to a small town of less than a dozen homes in the west of the state. Her husband goes to work on a sheep property. Thelma is an inventive person and soon surprises her neighbours with the things in her home. She helps people and also helps at the pub where she averts a hold up. A dog helps to make her days. Her husband takes a job in the Northern Territory and only comes home every six weeks for a fortnight. After his death she has lots of money and becomes a member of a mining group.

AISC 2004, the 7th International Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence and S- bolicComputation,wasthelatestintheseriesofspecializedbiennialconferences foundedin1992byJacquesCalmetoftheUniversitat .. KarlsruheandJohnCa- bell of University College London with the initial title Arti?cial Intelligence and Symbolic Mathematical Computing (AISMC).TheM disappeared from the title between the 1996 and 1998 conferences. As the editors of the AISC 1998 p- ceedings said, the organizers of the current meeting decided to drop the adjective 'mathematical' and toemphasize that the conference is concerned with all aspects of symbolic computation in AI: mathematical foundations, implementations, and applications, including applications in industry and academia. This remains the intended pro?le of the series, and will ?gure in the call for papersfor AISC 2006,whichis intended to takeplaceinChina. Thedistribution of papers in the present volume over all the areas of AISC happens to be rather noticeably mathematical, an e?ect that emerged because we were concerned to select the best relevant papers that were o?ered to us in 2004, irrespective of their particular topics; hence the title on the cover.Nevertheless, we encourage researchersovertheentirespectrumofAISC,asexpressedbythe1998quotation above,to be intouchwith us abouttheir interestsandthe possibility ofeventual submission of papers on their work for the next conference in the series. The papers in the present volume are evidence of the health of the ?eld of AISC. Additionally, there are two reasons for optimism about the continuation of this situation.

This volume contains the invited papers, contributed papers, and poster s- maries accepted for the Fifth International Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence and Symbolic Computation (AISC 2000). The conference was held in Spain from 17 to 19 July 2000 at the Hotel NH Zurbano, Madrid, and was organized by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and the Sociedad Matem'aticaPuigAdam. One of the reasons for centralizing all activities at one hotel was to avoid both losing time in transportation around Madrid and the distribution of the att- dees into disconnected subgroups in diverse locations. In this way a breakfa- to-late-night coexistence (which included some extra-academic events) was - sured, with time for formal and informal conversations. This continued the AISMC/AISC tradition of the creation of a friendly atmosphere, where ideas could be exchanged in a relaxed and e?ective way. The conference belongs to a specialized conference series founded by John Campbell and Jacques Calmet with the initial title "Arti?cial Intelligence and Symbolic Mathematical Computation" (AISMC).AISMC-1 took place in 1992 in Karlsruhe (Germany); AISMC-2 was held in 1994 at King's College (Cambridge, UK), and AISMC-3 in 1996 was located in Steyr (Austria). The proceedings of these conferences were published in Springer's LNCS series as volumes 737, 958, and 1138, respectively.

This volume contains the papers, updated in some cases,presented at the first AISMC (Artificial Intelligence andSymbolic Mathematical Computations)conference, held inKarlsruhe, August 3-6, 1992. This was the first conferenceto be devoted to such a topic after a long period when SMCmade no appearance in AI conferences, though it used to bewelcome in the early days of AI. Some conferences were heldrecently on mathematics and AI, but none was directlycomparable in scope to this conference.Because of the novelty of the domain, authors were givenlonger allocations of time than usual in which to presenttheir work. As a result, extended and fruitful discussionsfollowed each paper. The introductory chapter in this book,which was not presented during the conference, reflects inmany ways the flavor of these discussions and aims to setout the framework for future activities in this domain ofresearch. In addition to the introduction, the volumecontains 20 papers.

This volume contains thoroughly revised full versions of the best papers presented at the Second International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Sympolic Mathematical Computation, held in Cambridge, UK in August 1994.The 19 papers included give clear evidence that now, after a quite long period when AI and mathematics appeared to have arranged an amicable separation, these fields are growing together again as an area of fruitful interdisciplinary activities. This book explores the interaction between mathematical computation and clears the ground for future concentration on topics that can further unify the field.