Editorial: The 17th Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science Conference (AICS-06)

Abstract

This special issue of AI Review is devoted to papers selected from those presented at the 17th Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science (AICS-06), hosted by the School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland. The AICS Conference is Ireland’s foremost gathering of minds for those involved in the fields of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science. The conferences have taken place (almost annually) since 1988 and provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and the presentation of results relating to research conducted both in Ireland and worldwide. AICS conferences support the presentation and discussion of original research in the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science and related disciplines. In recent years papers have been presented in the areas of: Genetic Algorithms, Connectionist Models, Case-Based Reasoning, Information Retrieval, Learning, Robotics, Planning and Scheduling, Natural Language Processing and Cognitive Linguistics. This year selected conference authors were invited to submit extended and enhanced versions of their papers for consideration for inclusion in this special issue. The initial selection was made on the basis of the original reviewers’ comments and feedback from the conference. Subsequently, a second peer-review process resulted in the identification of the papers that appear in this issue. The eleven papers selected for publication are introduced below. They cover a broad range of topics and were selected on the basis of quality of research in terms of contribution to the subject. Three papers discuss research in the area of Information Retrieval. Smullen and O’Riordan describe an attempt to improve information retrieval. They propose a system based on the development of user profiles. An approach is described that attempts to learn a user’s