This volume contains the elaborated and harmonized versions of seven
lectures given at the first Advanced Course in Artificial Intelligence,
held in Vignieu, France, in July 1985. Most of them were written in
tutorial form; the book thus provides an extremely valuable guide to the
fundamental aspects of AI. In the first part, Delgrande and Mylopoulos
discuss the concept of knowledge and its representation. The second part
is devoted to the processing of knowledge. The contribution by Huet
shows that both computation and inference or deduction are just
different aspects of the same phenomenon. The chapter written by Stickel
gives a thorough and knowledgeable introduction to the most important
aspects of deduction by some form of resolution. The kind of reasoning
that is involved in inductive inference problem solving (or programming)
from examples, and in learning, is covered by Biermann. The tutorial by
Bibel covers the more important forms of knowledge processing that might
play a significant role in common sense reasoning. The third part of the
book focuses on logic programming and functional programming. Jorrand
presents the language FP2, where term rewriting forms the basis for the
semantics of both functional and parallel programming. In the last
chapter, Shapiro gives an overview of the current state of concurrent
PROLOG.