The diversity of applications and disciplines encompassed by the subfield of plan, intent, and activity recognition, while producing a wealth of ideas and results, has unfortunately contributed to fragmentation in the area because researchers present relevant results in a broad spectrum of journals and at conferences. This book serves to provide a coherent snapshot of the exciting developments in the field enabled by improved sensors, increased computational power, and new application areas. While the individual chapters are motivated by different applications and employ diverse technical approaches, they are unified by the ultimate task of understanding another agent’s behaviors.

As there is not yet a single common conference for this growing field, we hope that this book will serve as a valuable resource for researchers interested in learning about work originating from other communities. The editors have organized workshops in this topic area at the following artificial intelligence conferences since 2004:

• Modeling Other Agents From Observations (MOO 2004) at the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems, AAMAS-2004, organized by Gal Kaminka, Piotr Gmytrasiewicz, David Pynadath, and Mathias Bauer

• Modeling Other Agents From Observations (MOO 2005) at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-2005, organized by Gal Kaminka, David Pynadath, and Christopher Geib

• Modeling Other Agents From Observations (MOO 2006) at the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI-2006, organized by Gal Kaminka, David Pynadath, and Christopher Geib

• Plan, Activity, and Intent Recognition (PAIR 2007) at the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI-2007, organized by Christopher Geib and David Pynadath

• Plan, Activity, and Intent Recognition (PAIR 2009) at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-2009, organized by Christopher Geib, David Pynadath, Hung Bui, and Gita Sukthankar

• Plan, Activity, and Intent Recognition (PAIR 2010) at the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI-2010, organized by Gita Sukthankar, Christopher Geib, David Pynadath, and Hung Bui

• Plan, Activity, and Intent Recognition (PAIR 2011) at the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI-2011, organized by Gita Sukthankar, Hung Bui, Christopher Geib, and David Pynadath

• Dagstuhl Seminar on Plan Recognition in Dagstuhl, Germany, organized by Tanim Asfour, Christopher Geib, Robert Goldman, and Henry Kautz

• Plan, Activity, and Intent Recognition (PAIR 2013) at the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI-2013, organized by Hung Bui, Gita Sukthankar, Christopher Geib, and David Pynadath

The editors and many of the authors gathered together at the 2013 PAIR workshop to put the finishing touches on this book, which contains some of the best contributions from the community. We thank all of the people who have participated in these events over the years for their interesting research presentations, exciting intellectual discussions, and great workshop dinners.

Reprinted with permission from Morgan Kaufmann, an imprint of Elsevier.