This Festschrift volume, published in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of Artificial Intelligence, includes 34 refereed papers written by leading researchers in the field of Artificial Intelligence. The papers were carefully selected from the invited lectures given at the 50th Anniversary Summit of AI, held at the Centro Stefano Franscini, Monte Verità, Ascona, Switzerland, July 9-14, 2006.

The summit provided a venue for discussions on historical, business, political and educational perspectives of AI; scientific exchange on the state of the art; speculations about the future; contributions by researchers from different but related areas; presentations of the latest research by top scientists in the field; as well as many informal discussions among the participants and visitors. The selected papers reflect the breadth of the topics presented and discussed at the summit, covering subjects ranging from the history and prospects of AI, to speech recognition and processing, linguistics, bionics, and consciousness.

The papers are organized in topical sections on Historical and Philosophical Issues; Information Theory and Quantification; Morphology and Dynamics; Neurorobotics; Machine Intelligence, Cognition, and Natural Language Processing; Human-Like Intelligence: Motivation, Emotions, and Consciousness; Robot Platforms; and Art and AI.