Logical Foundations For Cognitive Agents

It is a pleasure and an honor to be able to present this collection of papers to Ray Reiter on the occasion of his 60th birthday. To say that Ray's research has had a deep impact on the field of Artificial Intel ligence is a considerable understatement. Better to say that anyone thinking of do ing work in areas like deductive databases, default reasoning, diagnosis, reasoning about action, and others should realize that they are likely to end up proving corol laries to Ray's theorems. Sometimes studying related work makes us think harder about the way we approach a problem; studying Ray's work is as likely to make us want to drop our way of doing things and take up his. This is because more than a mere visionary, Ray has always been a true leader. He shows us how to proceed not by pointing from his armchair, but by blazing a trail himself, setting up camp, and waiting for the rest of us to arrive. The International Joint Conference on Ar tificial Intelligence clearly recognized this and awarded Ray its highest honor, the Research Excellence award in 1993, before it had even finished acknowledging all the founders of the field. The papers collected here sample from many of the areas where Ray has done pi oneering work. One of his earliest areas of application was databases, and this is re flected in the chapters by Bertossi et at. and the survey chapter by Minker.

John Pollock aims to construct a theory of rational decision making for real agents--not ideal agents. Real agents have limited cognitive powers, but traditional theories of rationality have applied only to idealized agents that lack such constraints. Pollock argues that theories of ideal rationality are largely irrelevant to the decision making of real agents. Thinking about Acting aims to provide a theory of "real rationality."

Intended both as a text for advanced undergraduates and graduate students, and as a key reference work for AI researchers and developers, Logical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence is a lucid, rigorous, and comprehensive account of the fundamentals of artificial intelligence from the standpoint of logic. The first section of the book introduces the logicist approach to AI--discussing the representation of declarative knowledge and featuring an introduction to the process of conceptualization, the syntax and semantics of predicate calculus, and the basics of other declarative representations such as frames and semantic nets. This section also provides a simple but powerful inference procedure, resolution, and shows how it can be used in a reasoning system. The next several chapters discuss nonmonotonic reasoning, induction, and reasoning under uncertainty, broadening the logical approach to deal with the inadequacies of strict logical deduction. The third section introduces modal operators that facilitate representing and reasoning about knowledge. This section also develops the process of writing predicate calculus sentences to the metalevel--to permit sentences about sentences and about reasoning processes. The final three chapters discuss the representation of knowledge about states and actions, planning, and intelligent system architecture. End-of-chapter bibliographic and historical comments provide background and point to other works of interest and research. Each chapter also contains numerous student exercises (with solutions provided in an appendix) to reinforce concepts and challenge the learner. A bibliography and index complete this comprehensive work.

This volume contains the papers presented at the Eighth International C- ference on Logic for Programming, Arti?cial Intelligence and Reasoning (LPAR 2001), held on December 3-7, 2001, at the University of Havana (Cuba), together with the Second International Workshop on Implementation of Logics. There were 112 submissions, of which 19 belonged to the special subm- sion category of experimental papers, intended to describe implementations or comparisons of systems, or experiments with systems. Each submission was - viewed by at least three program committee members and an electronic program committee meeting was held via the Internet. The high number of submissions caused a large amount of work, and we are very grateful to the other 31 PC members for their e?ciency and for the quality of their reviews and discussions. Finally, the committee decided to accept 40papers in the theoretical ca- gory, and 9 experimental papers. In addition to the refereed papers, this volume contains an extended abstract of the invited talk by Frank Wolter. Two other invited lectures were given by Matthias Baaz and Manuel Hermenegildo. Apart from the program committee, we would also like to thank the other people who made LPAR 2001 possible: the additional referees; the Local Arran- ` gements Chair Luciano Garc ́?a; Andr ́es Navarro and Oscar Guell, ̈ who ran the internet-based submission software and the program committee discussion so- ware at the LSI Department lab in Barcelona; and Bill McCune, whose program committee management software was used.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Joint German/Austrian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, KI 2001, held in Vienna, Austria in September 2001. The 29 revised full technical papers presented together with one invited paper and four posters of industrial papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 79 submissions. All current aspects in AI are addressed, ranging from theoretical and foundational issues to industrial applications.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence, ICAART 2012, held in Vilamoura, Portugal, in February 2012. The 28 revised full papers presented together with one invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 292 submissions. The papers are organized in two topical sections on artificial intelligence and on agents.

The following are the proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Human and Machine Perception held in Palermo, Italy, on June 20 -23, 2000, under the auspices of three Institutions: the Cybernetic and Biophysics Group (GNCB) of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) and the two Inter-Department Centers of Cognitive Sciences of Palermo and Pavia University respectively. A broad spectrum of topics are covered in this series, ranging from computer perception to psychology and physiology of perception. The theme of this workshop on Human and Machine Perception was focused on Thinking, Deciding, and Acting. As in the past editions the final goal has been the analysis and the comparison of biological and artificial solutions. The focus of the lectures has been on presenting the state-of-the-art and outlining open questions. In particular, they sought to stress links, suggesting possible synergies between the different cultural areas. The panel discussion has been conceived as a forum for an open debate, briefly introduced by each panelist, and mainly aimed at deeper investigation of the different approaches to perception and strictly related topics. The panelists were asked to prepare a few statements on hot-points as a guide for discussion. These statements were delivered to the participants together with the final program, for a more qualified discussion.

Specifying and implementing dynamical systems with the situation calculus. Modeling and implementing dynamical systems is a central problem in artificial intelligence, robotics, software agents, simulation, decision and control theory, and many other disciplines. In recent years, a new approach to representing such systems, grounded in mathematical logic, has been developed within the AI knowledge-representation community. This book presents a comprehensive treatment of these ideas, basing its theoretical and implementation foundations on the situation calculus, a dialect of first-order logic. Within this framework, it develops many features of dynamical systems modeling, including time, processes, concurrency, exogenous events, reactivity, sensing and knowledge, probabilistic uncertainty, and decision theory. It also describes and implements a new family of high-level programming languages suitable for writing control programs for dynamical systems. Finally, it includes situation calculus specifications for a wide range of examples drawn from cognitive robotics, planning, simulation, databases, and decision theory, together with all the implementation code for these examples. This code is available on the book's Web site.