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The major theme of this book is Intelligent Agents. An agent is a hardware or software system that is autonomous, interactive with and reactive to its environment and other agents. An agent can also be pro-active in taking the initiative in goal-directed behaviour. Intelligent Agents are one of the most important and exciting areas of research and development in computer science today.
User modeling researchers look for ways of enabling interactive software systems to adapt to their users-by constructing, maintaining, and exploiting user models, which are representations of properties of individual users. User modeling has been found to enhance the effectiveness and/or usability of software systems in a wide variety of situations. Techniques for user modeling have been developed and evaluated by researchers in a number of fields, including artificial intelligence, education, psychology, linguistics, human-computer interaction, and information science. The biennial series of International Conferences on User Modeling provides a forum in which academic and industrial researchers from all of these fields can exchange their complementary insights on user modeling issues. The published proceedings of these conferences represent a major source of information about developments in this area.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 22nd Annual German Conference on Artificial Intelligence, KI-98, held in Bremen, Germany, in September 1998. The 16 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the proceedings. Also included are three invited papers and abstracts of two invited talks, as well as an appendix containing up-to-date descriptions of German AI projects. Thus the volume gives a unique overview of AI research in Germany.
The objective of the workshops associated with ER 2001, the 20th International Con- rence on Conceptual Modeling, was to give participants the opportunity to present and discuss emerging hot topics, thus adding new perspectives to conceptual modeling. This, the 20th ER conference, the ?rst of the 21st century, was also the ?rst one in Japan. The conference was held on November 27-30, 2001 at Yokohama National University with 192 participants from 31 countries. ER 2001 encompasses the entire spectrum of c- ceptual modeling, from theoretical aspects to implementations, including fundamentals, applications, and software engineering. In particular, ER 2001 emphasized e-business and reengineering. To meet this objective, we selected the following four topics and planned four international workshops: – International Workshop on Conceptual Modeling of Human/Organizational/Social Aspects of Manufacturing Activities (HUMACS 2001) Manufacturing enterprises have to confront a host of demands. The competitive climate, enhanced by communication and knowledge sharing, will require incr- singly rapid responses to market forces. Customer demands for higher quality, better services, and lower cost will force manufacturers to reach new levels of ?exibility and adaptability. Sophisticated customers will demand products customized to meet their needs. Industries have so far sought to cope with these challenges primarily through advances in traditional capital by installing more powerful hardware and software technology. Attention to the role of humans combined with organizational and social schemes in manufacturing has only been marginal. The workshop HUMACS 2001 aimed to challenge the relevance of this last point.
The use of Knowledge Engineering and Agent Technology (KEAT) for application development is now recognized as an alternative to conventional software techniques in many application domains. From the background of the IFIP IT&KNOWS conference held in late 1998, this volume aims to discuss the role and the perspectives of domain models and corresponding reasoning processes in the different application fields under a common perspective to create conceptual bases and methods to develop and to improve the use of this type of approach in the context of information technology.
High communication efforts and poor problem solving results due to restricted overview are two central issues in collaborative problem solving. This work addresses these issues by introducing the processes of agent melting and agent splitting that enable individual problem solving agents to continually and autonomously reconfigure and adapt themselves to the particular problem to be solved. The author provides a sound theoretical foundation of collaborative problem solving itself and introduces various new design concepts and techniques to improve its quality and efficiency, such as the multi-phase agreement finding protocol for external problem solving, the composable belief-desire-intention agent architecture, and the distribution-aware constraint specification architecture for internal problem solving. The practical relevance and applicability of the concepts and techniques provided are demonstrated by using medical appointment scheduling as a case study.
MicroRNA (miRNA) genes produce three noncoding RNA products: the long primary transcript (pri-miRNA), the ~70 nucleotide pre-miRNA, and the ~22-nt mature miRNA. Only the mature miRNA is considered to be the functional species of a miRNA gene in recognizing cognate target mRNAs and modulating their expression. However, mature miRNAs are processed from the primary transcript through sequential endonucleolytic steps. As a result, the mature miRNA sequence is present in all three RNA products of a miRNA gene. It has thus been intrinsically difficult to determine the contribution of each miRNA gene product to target repression. In fact, direct functional roles for pri- and pre-miRNAs have never been ruled out. Here we show that pri- and pre-miRNAs may not be mere transitory intermediates of mature miRNA biogenesis. We found that ectopic expression of the C. elegans miRNA gene let-7 (cel-let-7) in human culture cells results in the production of truncated pre- and mature miRNAs that lack the first two 5' nucleotides, one of which is the first nucleotide of the miRNA seed region (nucleotide SD1). We found this nucleotide to be required for repression of target reporters by cel-let-7 in these cells, demonstrating that pri-let-7 may have a direct role in target repression. Further, we show that the nucleotide sequence and structure of both the pri-/pre-let-7 loop and stem regions play a key role in miRNA gene function in reporter assays. In vitro and in vivo analyses indicated the significance of these regions may be in the mediation of a physical interaction between pri-let-7 and target RNAs. These observations suggest that regulatory information encoded in the structured pri-miRNAs, but absent from mature miRNAs, could be directly interpreted for target recognition and repression through RNA:RNA interaction. Intriguingly, some mutations in the loop nucleotide sequence also restored processing of the 5' ends of C. elegans pre- and mature let-7 in culture cells, demonstrating that the pri-/pre-miRNA loop region can also regulate the precision of mature miRNA biogenesis. Importantly, in the presence of functional pre- and mature let-7, cel-let-7 activity in target repression consists of both SD1-independent and SD1-dependent components, implying potential contributions by both pri- and mature let-7. Finally, we interrogated the effects of pri-/pre-let-7 loop mutations on their ability to rescue a let-7 loss-of-function mutant phenotype in C. elegans. Our results indicate decreased significance of these parameters in the control of worm vulval development, although context-dependent differences in mature miRNA biogenesis between heterologous culture and live animals may partially explain this discrepancy. Taken together the work presented here reveals a novel layer of regulatory complexity encoded in long primary miRNAs that may have broad implications in understanding the mechanisms by which miRNA genes control target expression.
The book questions two key dichotomies: that of the apparent and real, and that of the internal and external. This leads to revised notions of the structure of experience and the object of knowledge. Our world is experienced as possibilities of action, and to know is to know what to do. A further consequence is that the mind is best considered as a property of organisms’ interactions with their environment. The unit of analysis is the loop of action and perception, and the central concept is the notion of habit of action, which provides the embodied basis of cognition as the anticipation of action. This holds for non-linguistic tacit meanings as well as for linguistic meanings. Habit of action is a teleological notion and thus opens a possibility for defining intentionality and normativity in terms of the soft naturalism adopted in the book. The mind is embodied, and this embodiment determines our physical perspective on the world. Our sensory organs and other instruments give us instrumental access to the world, and this access is epistemic in character. The distinction between the physical and conceptual viewpoint allows us to define truth as the correspondence with operational fit. This embodied epistemic truth is however not a sign of antirealism, as the instrumentally accessed theoretical objects are precisely those objects that experimental science deals with.