was very pleased to be asked to produce the sixth edition of my artificial intelligence book. It is a compliment to the earlier editions, started over twenty years ago, that our approach to AI has been so highly valued. It is also exciting that, as new development in the field emerges, we are able to present much of it in each new...

#^ecause you are reading this, 1 assume that you have recently become interested in database. Perhaps you would like to impress your friends by casually tossing out some big words that they have never heard before — words such as semantic object model, denormalization, or maybe even tuple. Perhaps your boss at work has just informed you...

I became interested in ML programming when I taught CS109, the introduc- tory Computer Science Foundations course at Stanford, starting in 1991. ML was used by several of the instructors of this course, including Stu Reges and Mike Cleron, to introduce concepts such as functional programming and type systems. It was also used for the...

All students interested in researching the Internet are living in very interesting and exciting times. From the Internet’s beginning in the 1960s up to the present day, the Internet has grown to become a vast platform where there are now 2 billion users of this global infrastructure.1 Predictions are that this number will rise to...

The IRF Conference provides a multi-disciplinary,...

Current search paradigms for the Web, direct access through search engines and navigational access via static taxonomies, have recently been strongly criticized. A third paradigm, dynamic taxonomies or faceted search, is gaining acceptance to the extent that it is now the de facto standard in product selection for e-commerce. This new...

In 1983 I left the International Institute for Aerospace Survey and Earth Sciences (ITC) and went to Wageningen Agricultural University, where I took the chair of “Land Surveying and Teledetection”. Up to that time I had been active mainly in geodesy and photogrammetry, but at Wageningen it soon became...

There is probably no invention in the history of mankind that had such a profound impact on our lives in such a short time as the World Wide Web. Twenty years ago, Tim Berners-Lee has developed the first versions of HTML which allowed to weave documents into the large hypertext document that we know today. It was soon realized that...

Video segmentation has been a key technique for visual information extraction and plays an important role in digital video processing, pattern recognition, and computer vision. A wide range of video-based applications will benefit from advances in video segmentation including security and surveillance, bank transactions monitoring,...

The IBM Vienna Laboratory has made a significant contribution to the work on the semantic description of computer systems. Both the operational semantics descriptions ("VDL") and the later work on denotational semantics ("Meta-IV", "VEM") contain interesting scientific ideas. Partly because of the large...

The 20th ICPR (International Conference on Pattern Recognition) Conference took place in Istanbul, Turkey, during August 23–26, 2010. For the first time in the ICPR history, several scientific contests (http://www.icpr2010.org/ contests.php) were organized in parallel to the conference main tracks. The purpose of these contests was to...