Ebook: Modeling and Using Context: 4th International and Interdisciplinary Conference CONTEXT 2003 Stanford, CA, USA, June 23–25, 2003 Proceedings

Whetheryouareacomputerscientist,alogician,aphilosopher,orapsychologist, it is crucial to understand the role that context and contextual information plays in reasoning and representation. The conference at which the papers in this volume were presented was the fourth in an international series devoted to research on context, and was held in Stanford (USA) on June 23–25, 2003. The ?rst conference in the series was held in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) in 1997, the second was held in Trento (Italy) in 1999, and the third was held in Dundee (Scotland, UK) in 2001. CONTEXT2003 brought together representative work from many di?erent ?elds: in this volume you will ?nd philosophical theorizing, logical formalization, computationalmodelling—and,indeed,computationalapplications—together with work that approaches context from a more cognitive orientation. While we don’t believe that this volume can capture the lively ?avor of discussion of the conference itself, we do hope that researchers interested in context (in any of its many manifestations) will ?nd something of interest here, perhaps something that will inspire new lines of work. We are very grateful to our invited speakers: Patrick Br´ ezillon (University of Paris VI, France), Keith Devlin (CSLI, Stanford), and David Leake (Indiana University, USA) for presenting three important contemporary perspectives on the study on context.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context, CONTEXT 2003, held in Stanford, CA, USA in June 2003.

The 31 full papers and 15 short papers presented were carefully reviewed, selected, and revised for inclusion in the book. The papers presented deal with the interdisciplinary topic of modeling and using context from various points of view, ranging through cognitive science, formal logic, artifical intelligence, computational intelligence, philosophical and psychological aspects, and information processing. Highly general philosophical and theoretical issues are complemented by specific applications in various fields.