Advances in Artificial Intelligence

Due to the increase and success of AI 'business', the number of people actively working in AI is undoubtedly growing rapidly. But the financial rewards of most current practical applications of artificial intelligence is resulting in a tendency for many to move away from theoretical, long-term research. The future of commercial AI products rest on the pace of technical advances because without significant theoretical developments, vendors will be selling 'more of the same' to consumers on cheaper and more powerful hardware rather than supplying new and improved kinds of products like second generation expert systems. The tone and quality of the papers included in this book however indicate that healthy fundamental research is continuing in AI and give cause for optimism about the future. The problems that AI researchers are addressing are the classical problems of AI - how can we produce intelligent behaviour by constructing systems that represent and reason about the world? The particular areas that have attracted most attention here are representing and reasoning about time, physical objects, belief and linguistic structure.
This volume indicates that real progress is being made in current AI work and is recommended reading for anyone who needs to know about the state of the art.