Introduction: Logic programming, non-monotonicreasoning and reasoning about actions

Abstract

On November 5, 1995, a special symposium on logic programming, non-monotonicreasoning and reasoning about actions, in honor of the 50th birthday ofProfessor Michael Gelfond, was held in El Paso, Texas. It was the first symposium ofthe El Paso Shell Oil Symposium series, jointly sponsored by the Shell Oil Companyand by the University of Texas at El Paso. Overall, 16 talks were presented by researchers from the USA (New Mexico StateUniversity, Southern Methodist University, Stanford University, Syracuse University,University of Texas at Austin, and University of Texas at El Paso), Canada, andFinland. This issue contains the (peer-refereed) proceedings of this symposium. We arehappy to present this collection to our readers, and we want to thank all those withoutwhom this publication would not be possible:Shell Oil and the University of Texas at El Paso for generous support;the authors and all the participants of the symposium for their contributions;the referees for their tireless work;Martin Golumbic, the Editor-in-Chief of the Annals of Mathematics and ArtificialIntelligence, for the opportunity to publish the proceedings as an issue of thisjournal;and, last but not the least, Michael Gelfond for being a wonderful person, a brilliantresearcher, a good friend, and an inspiring teacher.