This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, PRICAI '96, held in Cairns, Queensland, Australia in August 1996. The 56 revised full papers included in the book were carefully selected for presentation at the conference from a total of 175 submissions. The topics covered are machine learning, interactive systems, knowledge representation, reasoning about change, neural nets and uncertainty, natural language, constraint satisfaction and optimization, qualitative reasoning, automated deduction, nonmonotonic reasoning, intelligent agents, planning, and pattern recognition.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium on Formal Techniques in Real-Time and Fault-Tolerant Systems, FTRTFTS '96, held in Uppsala, Sweden, in September 1996. The 22 revised full papers presented were selected from a total of 61 submissions; also included are three invited contributions and five tools demonstrations. The papers are organized in sections on state charts, timed automata, duration calculus, case studies, scheduling, fault tolerance, specification, and verification.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science, FST&TCS '96, held in Hyderabad, India, in December 1996. The volume presents 28 revised full papers selected from a total of 98 submissions; also included are four invited contributions. The papers are organized in topical sections on computational geometry, process algebras, program semantics, algorithms, rewriting and equational-temporal logics, complexity theory, and type theory.

This monograph presents a comprehensive state-of-the-art survey on approaches to the design of intelligent agents. On the theoretical side, the author identifies a set of general requirements for autonomous interacting agents and provides an essential step towards understanding the principles of intelligent agents. On the practical side, the novel agent architecture InteRRaP is introduced: the detailed description and evaluation of this architecture is an ideal guideline and case study for software engineers or researchers faced with the task of building an agent system. The book uniquely bridges the gap between theory and practice; it addresses active and novice researchers as well as practitioners interested in applicable agent technology.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third European Workshop on Case-Based Reasoning, EWCBR-96, held in Lausanne, Switzerland, in November 1996. Case-based reasoning is an appealing technique for dealing with the knowledge acquisition bottleneck in computer applications; solutions to new problems are found by adapting similar experience from the past, called cases. The 38 revised full papers presented were carefully selected from a broad variety of submissions after a thorough refereeing process. The volume refleats the state of the art in case-based reasoning research and applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Discrete Geometry for Computer Imagery, DGCI'96, held in Lyon, France, in November 1996. Computer imaging essentially depends on discrete models for coding, processing, recognition, representation, etc. The volume presents 24 revised full papers selected from 41 submissions together with 3 invited contributions and a tutorial paper, which bridges the gap between theory and practice. The issues addressed are topology, geometry, shape representation, 3D surfaces and volumes, models for discrete space, image transformation and generation.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second Asian Conference on Computing Science, ASIAN'96, held in Singapore in December 1996. The volume presents 31 revised full papers selected from a total of 169 submissions; also included are three invited papers and 14 posters. The papers are organized in topical sections on algorithms, constraints and logic programming, distributed systems, formal systems, networking and security, programming and systems, and specification and verification.