Special Issue on the Eighth European Conference on Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty (ECSQARU 2005)

Abstract

This special issue brings the extended versions of a set of selected papers presented at the Eighth European Conference on Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty, ECSQARU 2005, held in Barcelona (Spain), on July 6–8, 2005. The ECSQARU conferences are biannual and have become a major forum for advances in the theory and practice of reasoning under uncertainty. The first ECSQARU conference was held in Marseille (1991), then in Granada (1993), Fribourg (1995), Bonn (1997), London (1999), Toulouse (2001) and Aalborg (2003). A total of 130 papers were submitted to EQSCARU 2005, out of which 79 were selected after a strict review process by the members of the Program Committee and were published in the LNAI series, together with three invited lectures and papers of a special session on successful industrial applications. Based on nominations by the session chairs, we invited the authors of 12 papers to submit an extended version for inclusion in this special issue. These extended papers then underwent a new revision process according to IJAR standards. We thank the Editor-in-Chief, Thierry Denouex, the authors and the referees for their valuable work in making this special issue a reality. The topics of the selected papers faithfully reflect the variety of current research interests of the community. They range from new techniques and applications for Bayesian networks (papers by Rumi and Salmeron, by Pena et al., by De Campos and Castellano and by Nielsen and Jensen), logical approaches to deal with uncertainty and/or inconsistency (papers by Avron, by Lukasiewicz, by Besnard and by Amgoud and Kaci), new developments on fundamental aspects of different uncertainty formalisms (papers by Vantaggi and Coletti, by Huellermeier and Dubois, by Bouckaert and Studený) and planning under uncertainty (paper by Majercik). This volume is dedicated to the memory of Philippe Smets, the founder of the ECSQARU conferences, who passed away shortly after the 2005 conference. He was strongly involved in the preparation of this conference and we will be always indebted to him for