Planning algorithms are impacting technical disciplines and industries around the world, including robotics, computer-aided design, manufacturing, computer graphics, aerospace applications, drug design, and protein folding. Written for computer scientists and engineers with interests in artificial intelligence, robotics, or control theory, this is the only book on this topic that tightly integrates a vast body of literature from several fields into a coherent source for teaching and reference in a wide variety of applications. Difficult mathematical material is explained through hundreds of examples and illustrations.

Artificial Intelligence is one of the most fascinating and unusual areas of academic study to have emerged this century. For some, AI is a true scientific discipline, that has made important and fundamental contributions to the use of computation for our understanding of nature and phenomena of the human mind; for others, AI is the black art of computer science. Artificial Intelligence Today provides a showcase for the field of AI as it stands today. The editors invited contributions both from traditional subfields of AI, such as theorem proving, as well as from subfields that have emerged more recently, such as agents, AI and the Internet, or synthetic actors. The papers themselves are a mixture of more specialized research papers and authorative survey papers. The secondary purpose of this book is to celebrate Springer-Verlag's Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series.

New Directions in the Future of Work explores vital research and industrial issues that are central to understanding the concepts of the Future of Work and address key challenges in this evolving area of debate.

"The central fact is that we are planning agents." (M. Bratman, Intentions, Plans, and Practical Reasoning, 1987, p. 2) Recent arguments to the contrary notwithstanding, it seems to be the case that people-the best exemplars of general intelligence that we have to date do a lot of planning. It is therefore not surprising that modeling the planning process has always been a central part of the Artificial Intelligence enterprise. Reasonable behavior in complex environments requires the ability to consider what actions one should take, in order to achieve (some of) what one wants and that, in a nutshell, is what AI planning systems attempt to do. Indeed, the basic description of a plan generation algorithm has remained constant for nearly three decades: given a desciption of an initial state I, a goal state G, and a set of action types, find a sequence S of instantiated actions such that when S is executed instate I, G is guaranteed as a result. Working out the details of this class of algorithms, and making the elabora tions necessary for them to be effective in real environments, have proven to be bigger tasks than one might have imagined.

“Intelligent systems are those which produce intelligent o?springs.” AI researchers have been focusing on developing and employing strong methods that are capable of solving complex real-life problems. The 18th International Conference on Industrial & Engineering Applications of Arti?cial Intelligence & Expert Systems (IEA/AIE 2005) held in Bari, Italy presented such work performed by many scientists worldwide. The Program Committee selected long papers from contributions presenting more complete work and posters from those reporting ongoing research. The Committee enforced the rule that only original and unpublished work could be considered for inclusion in these proceedings. The Program Committee selected 116 contributions from the 271 subm- ted papers which cover the following topics: arti?cial systems, search engines, intelligent interfaces, knowledge discovery, knowledge-based technologies, na- ral language processing, machine learning applications, reasoning technologies, uncertainty management, applied data mining, and technologies for knowledge management. The contributions oriented to the technological aspects of AI and the quality of the papers are witness to a research activity clearly aimed at consolidating the theoretical results that have already been achieved. The c- ference program also included two invited lectures, by Katharina Morik and Roberto Pieraccini. Manypeoplecontributedindi?erentwaystothesuccessoftheconferenceand to this volume. The authors who continue to show their enthusiastic interest in applied intelligence research are a very important part of our success. We highly appreciate the contribution of the members of the Program Committee, as well as others who reviewed all the submitted papers with e?ciency and dedication.