as people do we must understand qualitative reasoning about processes, when they will occur, their effects, and when they will stop. Qualitative process theory defines a simple notion of physical process that appears useful as a language in which to write dynamical theories. Reasoning about processes also

This paper provides an elementary, non-technical, survey of auction theory, by introducing and describing some of the critical papers in the subject. (The most important of these are reproduced in a companion book, The Economic Theory of Auctions, Paul Klemperer (ed.), Edward Elgar (pub

. The behaviour of such a hump on entering a bottleneck, which is too narrow to admit the increased flow, is studied (?5), and methods are obtained for estimating the extent and duration of the resulting hold-up. The theory is applicable principally to traffic behaviour over a long stretch of road, but the paper

, planning under uncertainty, sensor-based planning, visibility, decision-theoretic planning, game theory, information spaces, reinforcement learning, nonlinear systems, trajectory planning, nonholonomic planning, and kinodynamic planning.

This paper provides an overview of research and development activities in the field of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. It aims to identify key concepts and applications, and to indicate how they relate to one-another. Some historical context to the field of agent-based computing

, we reflect on the lessons of experience and chart the course traveled by research ideas as they grow into production systems.

Instrumenting the physical world through large networks of wireless sensor nodes, particularly for applications like environmental monitoring of water and soil, requires that these nodes be very small, light, untethered and unobtrusive. The problem of localization, i.e., determining where a given

the last ten years and to take a critical view of these developments from several perspectives: logical, epistemological, computational and suitability to application. The paper attempts to expose some of the challenges and prospects for the further development of the field.

In recent years research in the planning community has moved increasingly towards application of planners to realistic problems involving both time and many types of resources. For example, interest in planning demonstrated by the space research community has inspired work in observation scheduling

Many AI researchers are today striving to build agent teams for complex, dynamic multi-agent domains, with intended applications in arenas such as education, training, entertainment, information integration, and collective robotics. Unfortunately, uncertainties in these complex, dynamic domains