New frontiers in artificial intelligence

The Japanese Society for Arti?cial Intelligence (JSAI) was established in July 1986.Sincethen,wehaveheldconferenceseveryyear.AlthoughJSAIisthe second largest community in the world focusing on the area of Arti?cial - telligence and we have over 3,000 members, the importance of the research presented and discussions held at the annual conferences has not been fully recognized in the Arti?cial Intelligence communities elsewhere in the world, partlybecausemostpresentationsaremadeintheJapaneselanguage.T- refore, the program committee of the Fifteenth Annual Conference of JSAI decided to open the door to the world and hold international workshops - ring the conference on May 20th and 25th, 2001 in Matsue City, Japan.^ TheworkshopproposalsweregatheredfromthemembersofJSAI.We accepted the following up-to-date and exciting topics: 1) Social Intelligence DesignchairedbyProf.ToyoakiNishida,UniversityofTokyo,2)Agent-Based ApproachesinEconomicandSocialComplexSystemschairedbyProf.Akira Namatame, National Academy of Defense, 3) Rough Set Theory and Granular ComputingchairedbyProf.ShusakuTsumoto,ShimaneMedicalUniversity, 4)ChanceDiscoverychairedbyProf.YukioOsawa,and5)Challengein KnowledgeDiscoveryandDataMiningchairedbyProf.TakashiWashio, OsakaUniversity.Theseworkshopswerehighlywelcomeandsuccessful.A total of 116 people in Japan and 30 researchers from abroad participated in them.^ This volume of the proceedings contains selected papers presented at the workshops.Thecontentsofthevolumearedividedinto?veparts,eachof whichcorrespondstothetopicsoftheworkshops.Eachpaperwasstrictly reviewedbythecommitteemembersoftheworkshops.Theyalsocoverrecent divergentareasofarti?cialintelligence.Webelievethatthevolumeishighly useful for both researchers and practitioners who have interests in recent advances in arti?cial intelligence. October 2001 TakaoTerano JSAIWorkshopsasInternationalTrends Looking at the current economic, political, and ecological situations, we - come aware of the dynamic environment surrounding all human activities. Hand in hand, the expansion of the World Wide Web is activating the whole globe as an information system including humans, computers, and networks.