Artificial Intelligence Research and Development

Book excerpt: Artificial Intelligence (AI) has started the evolution in computer science. It is in good health, as many companies qualify their novelties as ‘smart’ or ‘intelligent’. The term ‘society of knowledge’ draws society nearer to the future and is a symbol of breakthrough. From this perspective, AI has reached maturity and has exploded into an endless set of sub-areas, getting in touch with all other disciplines, such as situation assessment, analysis and interpretation of music, management of environmental and biological systems, planning trains, routing of communication networks, assisting medical diagnosis or powering auctions. The wide variety of Artificial Intelligence application areas has meant that AI researchers often become scattered in different micro specialized fields. There are few occasions where the AI research community joins together, while computer scientists and engineers can find a lot of interesting ideas from the cross fertilization of results coming from all of these application areas. This book provides a representative selection of papers promoting synergies in the research community and includes papers on: Neural Networks, Computer Vision, Applications, Machine Learning, Reasoning, Planning and Robotics and Multi-Agent Systems. All of the papers collected in this volume would be of interest to any computer scientist or engineer interested in AI.