Louisa May Alcott

Francesca Rossi

Little Women

Krzysztof R. Apt

Francois Fages

Peter Szeredi

Josef Váncza

Constraint programming is the fruit of several decades of research carried out in mathematical logic, automated deduction, operations research and arti?cial intelligence. The tools and programming languages arising from this research ?eldhaveenjoyedrealsuccessintheindustrialworldastheycontributetosolving hard combinatorial problems in diverse domains such as production planning, communication networks, robotics and bioinformatics. This volume contains the extended and reviewed versions of a selection of papers presented at the Joint ERCIM/CoLogNET International Workshop on Constraint Solving and Constraint Logic Programming (CSCLP2003), which was held from June 30 to July 2, 2003. The venue chosen for the seventh edition of this annual workshop was the Computer and Automation Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA SZTAKI) in Budapest, Hungary. This institute is one of the 20 members of the Working Group on Constraints of the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM). For many participants this workshop provided the ?rst opportunity to visit their ERCIM partner in Budapest. CoLogNET is the European-funded network of excellence dedicated to s- porting and enhancing cooperation and research on all areas of computational logic, and continues the work done previously by the Compulog Net. In part- ular, the aim of the logic and constraint logic programming area of CoLogNET is to foster and support all research activities related to logic programming and constraint logic programming. The editors would like to take the opportunity and thank all the authors who submitted papers to this volume, as well as the reviewers for their helpful work.

Joint ERCIM/CoLogNET International Workshop on Constraint Solving and Constraint Logic Programming, CSCLP 2003, Budapest, Hungary, June 30 - July 2, 2003, Selected Papers

Recent Advances in Constraints

Mats Carlsson

Brahim Hnich

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed and extended post-proceedings of the Joint ERCIM/CoLogNet International Workshop on Constraint Solving and Constraint Logic Programming, CSCLP 2005. The 12 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers are organized in topical sections on global constraints, search and heuristics, language and implementation issues, and modeling.

Joint ERCIM/CoLogNET International Workshop on Constraint Solving and Constraint Logic Programming, CSCLP 2005, Uppsala, Sweden, June 20-22, 2005, Revised Selected and Invited Papers

J. M. Barrie

Peter Pan

François Fages

Sylvain Soliman

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed and extended post-workshop proceedings of the 12th Annual ERCIM International Workshop on Constraint Solving and Constraint Logic Programming, CSCLP 2007, held in Rocquencourt, France, in June 2007. The 10 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 16 initial submissions. The papers address all aspects of constraint and logic programming, including foundational issues, implementation techniques, new applications as well as teaching issues. Particular emphasis is placed on assessing the current state of the art and identifying future directions.

12th Annual ERCIM International Workshop on Constraint Solving and Contraint Logic Programming, CSCLP 2007 Rocquencourt, France, June 7-8, 2007 Revised Selected Papers

Krzysztof Apt

Alexis Tsoukias

Algorithmic decision theory is a new interdisciplinary research area that aims to bring together researchers from di?erent ?elds such as decision theory, d- crete mathematics, theoretical computer science and arti?cial intelligence, in order to improve decision support in the presence of massive databases, com- natorial structures, partial and/or uncertain information and distributed, p- sibly interoperating, decision makers. Such problems arise in several real-world decision-making scenarios such as humanitarian logistics, epidemiology, risk assessment and management, e-government, electronic commerce, and rec- mender systems. In 2007, the EU-funded COST Action IC0602 on Algorithmic Decision T- ory was started, networking a number of researchers and research laboratories around Europe (and beyond). The COST Action IC0602 now gathers over 100 participants from more than 30 countries (including non-COST countries such as Australia, South Africa and the USA). For more details see www.algodec.org. Within the Action, and in cooperation with the EURO Working Group on Pr- erences,itwasdecidedtostartanewseriesofconferencesonalgorithmicdecision theory, the goal being to provide a forum for researchers interested in this area. This volume contains the papers presented at ADT 2009, the ?rst Inter- tional Conference on Algorithmic Decision Theory. The conference was held in SanServolo,a smallislandintheVenetianLagoon,onOctober20–23,2009.The programoftheconferenceincludedoralpresentations,posters,invitedtalks,and tutorials (for more information see www.adt2009.org).

First International Conference, ADT 2009, Venice, Italy, October 2009, Proceedings

Algorithmic Decision Theory

This volume contains the papers presented at ADT 2009, the first International Conference on Algorithmic Decision Theory. The conference was held in San Servolo, a small island of the Venice lagoon, during October 20-23, 2009. The program of the conference included oral presentations, posters, invited talks, and tutorials. The conference received 65 submissions of which 39 papers were accepted (9 papers were posters). The topics of these papers range from computational social choice preference modeling, from uncertainty to preference learning, from multi-criteria decision making to game theory.

Palermo, anni Cinquanta. La giovane contessa Livia Altamura vive con il padre, uomo che pretende di avere il controllo assoluto sulla vita di sua figlia e, sistematicamente, quasi traendone un piacere perverso, si diverte a soffocarne ogni aspirazione, perfino quella di diventare medico. Livia, seppur oppressa da questa situazione, non ha il coraggio di sottrarsi all’autorità paterna, dilaniata dal desiderio di indipendenza e dal dovere di assecondare le convenzioni sociali. Il senso di inadeguatezza che l’attanaglia trova conforto nel ricordo, sempre vivido, della voce di sua madre, morta quando lei era molto piccola e dei versi del poemetto dedicato alla Baronessa di Carini, che la donna le cantava per farla addormentare. Per Livia il passato è avvolto in una nebbia fitta e oscura che nessuno, inspiegabilmente, vuole aiutarla a dissipare, mentre il futuro sembra già scritto negli imperscrutabili disegni di don Enrico Altamura. Una sera, però, la vita della ragazza ha una svolta inaspettata e sorprendente. Durante una gita tra amici al castello di Carini, le sembra di scorgere in uno specchio l’immagine di una mano insanguinata e di una giovane donna che tenta di lanciarle un misterioso messaggio. A chi appartiene quel viso pallido e spaventato? Potrebbe trattarsi del fantasma della baronessa Laura Lanza che, secondo le leggende, vagherebbe ancora nel castello dopo il suo cruento assassinio? Angosciata dal dubbio che la strana apparizione non sia il frutto della sua immaginazione, Livia decide di approfondire la storia di Laura, unico legame con la madre sopravvissuto al tempo e all’ostracismo del padre. Da quel momento le vite delle due nobildonne si intrecciano, sovrapponendosi a dispetto dei secoli che le separano, in bilico tra amori impossibili e matrimoni imposti, sogni e doveri, verità e inganni, tradimenti e oscuri silenzi che raggiungono il culmine nel colpo di scena finale. Alla storia fa da sfondo una Palermo sospesa tra il passato e il presente, dove la luce lascia distinguere i contorni accennati di leggendarie ombre che non hanno mai smesso di manovrare i fili del potere in Sicilia. Le ombre occulte dei Beati Paoli.

Livia e Laura

La principessa Toussaint Mervat al-Kabir ha abbandonato da anni la vita nel regno di Durat, incastonato tra le dune del deserto nella Penisola Araba. Si è ribellata a un matrimonio imposto e alla famiglia per inseguire un sogno di libertà che l’ha portata fino a Parigi, nel celebre quartiere di Montmartre. A costo di grandi sacrifici è diventata una giornalista, una scrittrice e una nota conduttrice televisiva impegnata in prima linea in favore dei diritti delle donne di tutto il mondo. I suoi reportage e le sue inchieste le hanno fatto guadagnare l’appellativo di “detective delle donne”. Nel suo nome c’è l’essenza araba e quella europea, quest’ultima bizzarro dono di una madre dal carattere non convenzionale. La vita di Toussaint Mervat, però, è costellata anche da grandi dolori, come la mancanza d’amore e la misteriosa morte del suo amato fratello, che le ha lasciato in eredità una nipote vivace e intelligente, la principessa Hanan. Quando Valentine, l’amica del cuore di sua nipote, scompare misteriosamente durante un viaggio a Mosca, forse caduta nella ragnatela della tratta delle bianche, Toussaint e Hanan partono alla volta della Russia, per risolvere l’intricato enigma. Scopriranno una crudele realtà, nascosta sotto la patina dorata della ricchezza e del lusso sfrenato. Inaspettatamente la vicenda di Valentine rappresenta per Toussaint la possibilità di fare un passo in più verso la soluzione del mistero che avvolge la fine di suo fratello e, forse, di trovare l’amore vero. Toussaint. Inganno a Mosca è il primo romanzo, autoconclusivo, della serie dedicata alla detective delle donne.

Toussaint - Inganno a Mosca

Carlo Collodi

Pinocchio

L’intelligenza artificiale è ancora in una fase di incubazione. Qualche esemplare fa già parte della nostra vita, come il navigatore satellitare o la pubblicità personalizzata sul web. Altre tecnologie arriveranno presto a cambiare il nostro mondo. Per esempio, il machine learning e la macchina a guida autonoma. Di queste tecnologie, appena sconfinate dalla fantascienza alla scienza, si occupa Francesca Rossi al T.J. Watson Research Center di Ibm a New York. Che cosa significa trovarsi al fronte del progresso scientifico? Rossi racconta dall’interno del laboratorio le sfide del ricercatore di ia e spiega che oggi non consistono solo nel potenziamento delle capacità di questa nuova tecnologia, ma anche nel massimo beneficio possibile per la società e dunque nello studio delle implicazioni etiche di questa straordinaria rivoluzione. Quando si tratta di intelligenza artificiale, la nozione di “intelligenza” non è poi così lontana da quella che usiamo nel linguaggio di tutti i giorni e indica la capacità di prendere decisioni, di pianificare e di fare inferenze. “Per poterci fidare dell’ia, allora, è importante che essa segua i nostri stessi principi etici e valori morali e che abbia compreso perfettamente qual è il problema che deve risolvere. Dato che molte tecniche di ia si basano in modo fondamentale su grandi quantità di dati personali e le aziende devono essere responsabili e trasparenti.” Rossi, recentemente incaricata dalla Commissione Europea di guidare il gruppo di ricerca che sovrintende alla diffusione dell’ia, racconta la storia di questa rivoluzione epocale e ci guida fino alle scoperte più recenti, portandoci sino al confine del futuro, che finalmente diventa immaginabile.

Possiamo fidarci dell’intelligenza artificiale?

Il confine del futuro

Ventimila leghe sotto i mari dal capolavoro di Jules Verne. Ediz. a colori

Toby Walsh

Kristen Brent Venable

Computational social choice is an expanding field that merges classical topics like economics and voting theory with more modern topics like artificial intelligence, multiagent systems, and computational complexity. This book provides a concise introduction to the main research lines in this field, covering aspects such as preference modelling, uncertainty reasoning, social choice, stable matching, and computational aspects of preference aggregation and manipulation. The book is centered around the notion of preference reasoning, both in the single-agent and the multi-agent setting. It presents the main approaches to modeling and reasoning with preferences, with particular attention to two popular and powerful formalisms, soft constraints and CP-nets. The authors consider preference elicitation and various forms of uncertainty in soft constraints. They review the most relevant results in voting, with special attention to computational social choice. Finally, the book considers preferences in matching problems. The book is intended for students and researchers who may be interested in an introduction to preference reasoning and multi-agent preference aggregation, and who want to know the basic notions and results in computational social choice. Table of Contents: Introduction / Preference Modeling and Reasoning / Uncertainty in Preference Reasoning / Aggregating Preferences / Stable Marriage Problems

Between Artificial Intelligence and Social Choice

A Short Introduction to Preferences

Peter van Beek

Constraint programming is a powerful paradigm for solving combinatorial search problems that draws on a wide range of techniques from artificial intelligence, computer science, databases, programming languages, and operations research. Constraint programming is currently applied with success to many domains, such as scheduling, planning, vehicle routing, configuration, networks, and bioinformatics. The aim of this handbook is to capture the full breadth and depth of the constraint programming field and to be encyclopedic in its scope and coverage. While there are several excellent books on constraint programming, such books necessarily focus on the main notions and techniques and cannot cover also extensions, applications, and languages. The handbook gives a reasonably complete coverage of all these lines of work, based on constraint programming, so that a reader can have a rather precise idea of the whole field and its potential. Of course each line of work is dealt with in a survey-like style, where some details may be neglected in favor of coverage. However, the extensive bibliography of each chapter will help the interested readers to find suitable sources for the missing details. Each chapter of the handbook is intended to be a self-contained survey of a topic, and is written by one or more authors who are leading researchers in the area. The intended audience of the handbook is researchers, graduate students, higher-year undergraduates and practitioners who wish to learn about the state-of-the-art in constraint programming. No prior knowledge about the field is necessary to be able to read the chapters and gather useful knowledge. Researchers from other fields should find in this handbook an effective way to learn about constraint programming and to possibly use some of the constraint programming concepts and techniques in their work, thus providing a means for a fruitful cross-fertilization among different research areas. The handbook is organized in two parts. The first part covers the basic foundations of constraint programming, including the history, the notion of constraint propagation, basic search methods, global constraints, tractability and computational complexity, and important issues in modeling a problem as a constraint problem. The second part covers constraint languages and solver, several useful extensions to the basic framework (such as interval constraints, structured domains, and distributed CSPs), and successful application areas for constraint programming. - Covers the whole field of constraint programming - Survey-style chapters - Five chapters on applications

Handbook of Constraint Programming

Manfred Morari

Lothar Thiele

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control, HSCC 2005, held in Zurich, Switzerland in March 2005. The 40 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited papers and the abstract of an invited talk were carefully reviewed and selected from 91 submissions. The papers focus on modeling, analysis, and implementation of dynamic and reactive systems involving both discrete and continuous behaviors. Among the topics addressed are tools for analysis and verification, control and optimization, modeling, engineering applications, and emerging directions in programming language support and implementation.

8th International Workshop, HSCC 2005, Zurich, Switzerland, March 9-11, 2005, Proceedings

Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control

Giada Francia

Through her great capacity to love, a kind and beautiful maid releases a handsome prince from the spell which has made him an ugly beast.

Francesca Rossi

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