KI-99: Advances in Artificial Intelligence 23rd Annual German Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Bonn, Germany, September 13-15, 1999 Proceedings

For many years, Arti?cial Intelligence technology has served in a great variety of successful applications. AI researchand researchershave contributed much to the vision of the so-called Information Society. As early as the 1980s, some of us imagined distributed knowledge bases containing the explicable knowledge of a company or any other organization. Today, such systems are becoming reality. In the process, other technologies have had to be developed and AI-technology has blended with them, and companies are now sensitive to this topic. TheInternetandWWWhaveprovidedtheglobalinfrastructure,whileatthe same time companies have become global in nearly every aspect of enterprise. This process has just started, a little experience has been gained, and therefore it is tempting to re?ect and try to forecast, what the next steps may be. This has given us one of the two main topics of the 23rd Annual German Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence (KI-99)held at the University of Bonn: The Knowledge Society. Two of our invited speakers, Helmut Willke, Bielefeld, and Hans-Peter Kriegel, Munich, dwell on di?erent aspects with di?erent perspectives. Helmut Willke deals with the concept of virtual organizations, while Hans-Peter Kriegel applies data mining concepts to pattern recognitiontasks.The three application forums are also part of the Knowledge Society topic: “IT-based innovation for environment and development”, “Knowledge management in enterprises”, and “Knowledgemanagementinvillageandcityplanningoftheinformationsociety”.

Invited Papers.- From AI to Systemic Knowledge Management.- MINERVA: A Tour-Guide Robot that Learns.- Dynamics, Morphology, and Materials in the Emergence of Cognition.- Natural Language Description of Image Sequences as a Form of Knowledge Representation.- Knowledge Discovery in Spatial Databases.- Cooperative Distributed Vision: Dynamic Integration of Visual Perception, Action, and Communication.- Technical Papers-Section 1.- Computing Probabilistic Least Common Subsumers in Description Logics.- Revising Nonmonotonic Theories: The Case of Defeasible Logic.- On the Translation of Qualitative Spatial Reasoning Problems into Modal Logics.- Following Conditional Structures of Knowledge.- Section 2.- A Theory of First-Order Counterfactual Reasoning.- Logic—Based Choice of Projective Terms.- Knowledge Based Automatic Composition and Variation of Melodies for Minuets in Early Classical Style.- Inferring Flow of Control in Program Synthesis by Example.- Section 3.- Compilation Schemes: A Theoretical Tool for Assessing the Expressive Power of Planning Formalisms.- Generalized Cases: Representation and Steps Towards Efficient Similarity Assessment.- Be Busy and Unique — or Be History—The Utility Criterion for Removing Units in Self-Organizing Networks.- Section 4.- Development of Decision Support Algorithms for Intensive Care Medicine: A New Approach Combining Time Series Analysis and a Knowledge Base System with Learning and Revision Capabilities.- Object Recognition with Shape Prototypes in a 3D Construction Scenario.- Probabilistic, Prediction-Based Schedule Debugging for Autonomous Robot Office Couriers.- Section 5.- Collaborative Multi-robot Localization.- Object Classification Using Simple, Colour Based Visual Attention and a Hierarchical Neural Network forNeuro-symbolic Integration.- A Flexible Architecture for Driver Assistance Systems.- Short Papers.- A Theory for Causal Reasoning.- Systematic vs. Local Search for SAT.- Information Environments for Software Agents.- Improving Reasoning Efficiency for Subclasses of Allen’s Algebra with Instantiation Intervals.- Agents in Traffic Modelling — From Reactive to Social Behaviour.- Time-Effect Relations of Medical Interventions in a Clinical Information System.