Several technologies are emerging that provide new ways to capture, store, present and use knowledge. This book is the first to provide a comprehensive introduction to five of the most important of these technologies: Knowledge Engineering, Knowledge Based Engineering, Knowledge Webs, Ontologies and Semantic Webs. For each of these, answers are given to a number of key questions (What is it? How does it operate? How is a system developed? What can it be used for? What tools are available? What are the main issues?). The book is aimed at students, researchers and practitioners interested in Knowledge Management, Artificial Intelligence, Design Engineering and Web Technologies. During the 1990s, Nick worked at the University of Nottingham on the application of AI techniques to knowledge management and on various knowledge acquisition projects to develop expert systems for military applications. In 1999, he joined Epistemics where he worked on numerous knowledge projects and helped establish knowledge management programmes at large organisations in the engineering, technology and legal sectors. He is author of the book "Knowledge Acquisition in Practice", which describes a step-by-step procedure for acquiring and implementing expertise. He maintains strong links with leading research organisations working on knowledge technologies, such as knowledge-based engineering, ontologies and semantic technologies.

Multiagent systems is an expanding field that blends classical fields like game theory and decentralized control with modern fields like computer science and machine learning. This monograph provides a concise introduction to the subject, covering the theoretical foundations as well as more recent developments in a coherent and readable manner. The text is centered on the concept of an agent as decision maker. Chapter 1 is a short introduction to the field of multiagent systems. Chapter 2 covers the basic theory of singleagent decision making under uncertainty.

The AAAI-07 workshop program was held Sunday and Monday, July 22-23, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The program included the following thirteen workshops: (1) Acquiring Planning Knowledge via Demonstration; (2) Configuration; (3) Evaluating Architectures for Intelligence; (4) Evaluation Methods for Machine Learning; (5) Explanation-Aware Computing; (6) Human Implications of Human-Robot Interaction; (7) Intelligent Techniques for Web Personalization; (8) Plan, Activity, and Intent Recognition; (9) Preference Handling for Artificial Intelligence; (10) Semantic e-Science; (11) Spatial and Temporal Reasoning; (12) Trading Agent Design and Analysis; and (13) Information Integration on the Web.

The AAAI-07 workshop program was held Sunday and Monday, July 22-23, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The program included the following thirteen workshops: (1) Acquiring Planning Knowledge via Demonstration; (2) Configuration; (3) Evaluating Architectures for Intelligence; (4) Evaluation Methods for Machine Learning; (5) Explanation-Aware Computing; (6) Human Implications of Human-Robot Interaction; (7) Intelligent Techniques for Web Personalization; (8) Plan, Activity, and Intent Recognition; (9) Preference Handling for Artificial Intelligence; (10) Semantic e-Science; (11) Spatial and Temporal Reasoning; (12) Trading Agent Design and Analysis; and (13) Information Integration on the Web.

We are very pleased to republish here extended versions of a sample of the papers drawn from the Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference (IAAI-06), which was held July 17-20, 2006, in Boston, Massachusetts. Three of these articles describe deployed applications and two describe emerging applications.

We are very pleased to republish here extended versions of a sample of the papers drawn from the Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference (IAAI-06), which was held July 17-20, 2006, in Boston, Massachusetts. Three of these articles describe deployed applications and two describe emerging applications.

Mixed-initiative assistants are agents that interact seamlessly with humans to extend their problem-solving capabilities or provide new capabilities. Developing such agents requires the synergistic integration of many areas of AI, including knowledge representation, problem solving and planning, knowledge acquisition and learning, multiagent systems, discourse theory, and human-computer interaction. This paper introduces seven aspects of mixed-initiative reasoning (task, control, awareness, communication, personalization, architecture, and evaluation) and discusses them in the context of several state-of-the-art mixed-initiative assistants. The goal is to provide a framework for understanding and comparing existing mixed-initiative assistants and for developing general design principles and methods.

Mixed-initiative assistants are agents that interact seamlessly with humans to extend their problem-solving capabilities or provide new capabilities. Developing such agents requires the synergistic integration of many areas of AI, including knowledge representation, problem solving and planning, knowledge acquisition and learning, multiagent systems, discourse theory, and human-computer interaction. This paper introduces seven aspects of mixed-initiative reasoning (task, control, awareness, communication, personalization, architecture, and evaluation) and discusses them in the context of several state-of-the-art mixed-initiative assistants. The goal is to provide a framework for understanding and comparing existing mixed-initiative assistants and for developing general design principles and methods.

DiamondHelp is a generic collaborative task guidance system motivated by the current usability crisis in high-tech home products. It combines an application-independent conversational interface (adapted from online chat programs) with an application-specific direct-manipulation interface. DiamondHelp is implemented in Java and uses Collagen for representing and using task models.

The Workshop program of the Twenty-First Conference on Artificial Intelligence was held July 16-17, 2006 in Boston, Massachusetts. The program was chaired by Joyce Chai and Keith Decker. The titles of the 17 workshops were AIDriven Technologies for Service-Oriented Computing; Auction Mechanisms for Robot Coordination; Cognitive Modeling and Agent-Based Social Simulations, Cognitive Robotics; Computational Aesthetics: Artificial Intelligence Approaches to Beauty and Happiness; Educational Data Mining; Evaluation Methods for Machine Learning; Event Extraction and Synthesis; Heuristic Search, Memory- Based Heuristics, and Their Applications; Human Implications of Human-Robot Interaction; Intelligent Techniques in Web Personalization; Learning for Search; Modeling and Retrieval of Context; Modeling Others from Observations; and Statistical and Empirical Approaches for Spoken Dialogue Systems.