Preface

Contents

May 1996 marks the tenth anniversary of the first workshop on qualitative reasoning. That first workshop was hosted by the Qualitative Reasoning Group of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Over the last ten years, the field has grown and stimulated a broad range of research activities. For a few years, qualitative reasoning was the area with tho largest number of submissions to AAAI. Several books on qualitative reasoning, both in English and Japanese, have been published. Additional workshops on qualitative reasoning are now regularly held in conjunction with ECAI and UCAI. During the same ten years, the workshop has also changed its name from the Qualitative Physics workshop, to the International Workshop on Qualitative Reasoning about Physical Systems, and most recently to the International Workshop on Qualitative Reasoning. These name changes reflect the community’s broadening interest in qualitative reasoning about non-physical domains.