Guest Editorial
AI-2008, the twenty-eighth SGAI International Conference on
Artificial Intelligence, was held in Cambridge, England from 9th
to 11th December, 2008. This special issue of Knowledge Based Sys-
tems comprises the 11 papers judged by the conference pro-
gramme committees to be the best refereed papers accepted for
the two streams of the conference.
The conference was organised by SGAI, the Specialist Group on
Artificial Intelligence. SGAI is a specialist group of the British Com-
puter Society and a member of ECCAI, the European Co-ordinating
Committee on Artificial Intelligence. It was the latest in a series of
conferences that has run annually without a break since 1981. This
year’s conference was held once again at Peterhouse College, Cam-
bridge. All papers submitted were reviewed by an international pa-
nel of expert referees.
The conference began with a preliminary day of half-day work-
shops on ‘Recent Developments in Intelligent Robotics Practice’,
‘Application of Natural Language Processing’, ‘Intelligent Systems
in Accounting, Finance and Management’ and ‘Artificial Intelli-
gence in Education’, together with the thirteenth UK Case-Based
Reasoning Workshop. The main conference comprised two days
of fully refereed papers divided into two streams. Each stream in-
cluded a plenary lecture and a presentation by the winner of the
prize for the best refereed paper in that stream. There were also
poster sessions for presentation of less significant results and work
in progress and the seventh British Computer Society prize compe-
tition for ‘Progress Towards Machine Intelligence’.
This year’s conference chair was Dr. Miltos Petridis (University
of Greenwich), with Dr. Frans Coenen (University of Liverpool) as
deputy conference chair responsible for local arrangements and
Professor Adrian Hopgood (De Montfort University) as workshop
organiser.
I acted as technical programme chair, with Dr. Frans Coenen
(University of Liverpool) as my deputy. The application programme
chair was Dr. Tony Allen (Nottingham Trent University), with Rich-
ard Ellis (Stratum Management Ltd.) as his deputy. Rosemary Gil-
ligan (University of Hertfordshire) was responsible for conference
finances as SGAI Treasurer. Alice Kerly (University of Birmingham)
and Dr. Nirmalie Wiratunga (Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen)
were responsible for research student liaison and poster sessions,
respectively. Dr. Miltos Petridis (University of Greenwich) organ-
ised the UK CBR Workshop. The conference administrator was Ra-
chel Browning (BCS), with paper administration by Bryony Bramer.
Technical stream
The set of papers for the technical stream begins with On the
Classification Performance of TAN and General Bayesian Networks by
Michael G. Madden (College of Engineering & Informatics, National
University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland). This paper challenges the
claim that General Bayesian Network (GBN) classifiers perform no
better than Naïve Bayes (NB) classifiers, demonstrating that GBN
classifiers significantly outperform NB on datasets analyzed, and
are comparable to TAN performance. It is argued that they deserve
greater attention, particularly in domains where insight into classi-
fication decisions, as well as good accuracy, is required. The paper
won the prize for the best refereed technical paper, which was once
again sponsored by Hewlett–Packard Laboratories.
The other papers included from this stream are:
Designing a Feedback Component of Intelligent Tutoring System for
Foreign Language by Anita Ferreira (Department of Spanish Lin-
guistics, Universidad de Concepcion, Chile) and John Atkinson
(Department of Computer Sciences, Universidad de Concepcion,
Chile).
Discovering Implicit Intention-Level Knowledge from Natural-Lan-
guage Texts by John Atkinson (Department of Computer Sciences,
Universidad de Concepcion, Chile), Anita Ferreira (Department
of Spanish Linguistics, Universidad de Concepcion, Chile) and
Elvis Aravena.
Exploring Design Space for an Integrated Intelligent System by N.
Hawes and J. Wyatt and A. Sloman (University of Birmingham,
UK).
A User-Extensible and Adaptable Parser Architecture by John Tobin
and Carl Vogel (School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trin-
ity College, Dublin, Ireland).
EMADS: An Extendible Multi-Agent Data Miner by Kamal Ali Albash-
iri, Frans Coenen and Paul Leng (University of Liverpool, UK).
Application stream
The papers from the application stream begin with Wireless LAN
Load-Balancing with Genetic Algorithms by Ted Scully and Kenneth
N. Brown (Department of Computer Science, University College
Cork, Ireland). The objective of this paper is to develop micro-ge-
netic and standard genetic algorithm-based load balancing tech-
niques that optimise throughput of IEEE 802.11 wireless local
area networks in areas of user congestion, thereby improving user
Quality of Service. The proposed genetic algorithms give a signifi-
cant improvement in performance over current techniques with-
out penalising any class of user. This paper won the prize for the
best refereed application paper.
The other papers included from this stream are:
Silog:
Speech
Input Logon by Sergio Grau, Tony Allen and Nasser
Sherk at (Nottingham Trent University, UK).
Deploying Embodied AI into Virtual Worlds by D.J.H. Burden
(Daden Limited).
0950-7051/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.knosys.2009.02.003
Knowledge-Based Systems 22 (2009) 487–488
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Knowledge-Based Systems
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/knosys