PRICAI 2000, held in Melbourne, Australia, is the sixth Pacific Rim Interna tional Conference on Artificial Intelligence and is the successor to the five earlier PRICAIs held in Nagoya (Japan), Seoul (Korea), Beijing (China), Cairns (Aus tralia) and Singapore in the years 1990, 1992, 1994, 1996 and 1998 respectively. PRICAI is the leading conference in the Pacific Rim region for the presenta tion of research in Artificial Intelligence, including its applications to problems of social and economic importance. The objectives of PRICAI are: To provide a forum for the introduction and discussion of new research results, concepts and technologies; To provide practising engineers with exposure to and an evaluation of evolving research, tools and practices; To provide the research community with exposure to the problems of practical applications of AI; and To encourage the exchange of AI technologies and experience within the Pacific Rim countries. PRICAI 2000 is a memorial event in the sense that it is the last one in the 20"" century. It reflects what researchers in this region believe to be promising for their future AI research activities. In fact, some salient features can be seen in the papers accepted. We have 12 papers on agents, while PRICAI 96 and 98 had no more than two or three. This suggests to us one of the directions in which AI research is going in the next century. It is true that agent research provides us with a wide range of research subjects from basic ones to applications.

This book presents selected tutorial lectures given at the summer school on Multi-Agent Systems and Their Applications held in Prague, Czech Republic, in July 2001 under the sponsorship of ECCAI and Agent Link. The 20 lectures by leading researchers in the field presented in the book give a competent state-of-the-art account of research and development in the field of multi-agent systems and advanced applications. The book offers parts on foundations of MAS; social behaviour, meta-reasoning, and learning; and applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th European Conference on Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty, ECSQARU 2001, held in Toulouse, France in September 2001. The 68 revised full papers presented together with three invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from over a hundred submissions. The book offers topical sections on decision theory, partially observable Markov decision processes, decision-making, coherent probabilities, Bayesian networks, learning causal networks, graphical representation of uncertainty, imprecise probabilities, belief functions, fuzzy sets and rough sets, possibility theory, merging, belief revision and preferences, inconsistency handling, default logic, logic programming, etc.

We are proud to introduce the proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature, PPSN VI, held in Paris, Prance, on 18-20 September 2000. PPSN VI was organized in association with the Genetic and Evolutionary Computing Conference (GECCO'2000) and the Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC'2000), reflecting the beneficial interaction between the conference activities in Europe and in the USA in the field of natural computation. Starting in 1990 in Dortmund, Germany (Proceedings, LNCS vol. 496, Sprin ger, 1991), this biannual meeting has been held in Brussels, Belgium (Procee dings, Elsevier, 1992), Jerusalem, Israel (Proceedings, LNCS vol. 866, Springer, 1994), Berlin, Germany (Proceedings, LNCS vol. 1141, Springer, 1996), and Amsterdam, The Netherlands (Proceedings, LNCS vol. 1498, Springer, 1998), where it was decided that Paris would be the location of the 2000 conference with Marc Schoenauer as the general chair. The scientific content of the PPSN conference focuses on problem solving pa radigms gleaned from a natural models. Characteristic for Natural Computing is the metaphorical use of concepts, principles and mechanisms underlying natural systems, such as evolutionary processes involving mutation, recombination, and selection in natural evolution, annealing or punctuated equilibrium processes of many-particle systems in physics, growth processes in nature and economics, collective intelligence in biology, DNA-based computing in molecular chemistry, and multi-cellular behavioral processes in neural and immune networks.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Field-Programmable Logics and Applications, FPL '98, held in Tallinn, Estonia, in August/September 1998. The 39 revised full papers presented were carefully selected for inclusion in the book from a total of 86 submissions. Also included are 30 refereed high-quality posters. The papers are organized in topical sections on design methods, general aspects, prototyping and simulation, development methods, accelerators, system architectures, hardware/software codesign, system development, algorithms on FPGAs, and applications.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the International Seminar on Generic Programming held in Dagstuhl Castle, Germany in April/May 1998.The 20 revised full papers were carefully reviewed for inclusion in the book. As the first book entirely devoted to the new paradigm of generic programming, this collection offers topical sections on foundations and methodology comparisons, programming methodology, language design, and applications.