Researchers in artificial intelligence (AI) who want to look at their field from new and stimulating points of view may be attracted to the title of this edited book, which promises to describe AI from “an international perspective.” What the editor, Bramer, means by this is that he intends to address two different aspects: how AI is developed in specific countries, and the state of the art of specific areas in AI, according to the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) AI Technical Committee.

The result of this twofold interpretation is a book with two types of papers: three papers describe AI research in Chile, France, and Italy; the remaining papers describe the state of the art in several AI subdisciplines and applications. These two types of papers form a heterogeneous collection that does not provide an exhaustive perspective of AI.

The papers that describe AI in regards to country reveal how AI researchers are organized in universities and labs, and the main achievements of national scholars. These papers might be useful to readers who are looking for national organizations that work on specific topics and projects; however, due to the limited number of countries described, the book offers too narrow a perspective.

The remaining papers describe the state of the art in specific areas. Most of the papers are clearly written and accessible to nonexperts who want to understand the current progress in each area. The well-written position paper on text and hypertext categorization can also be used as introductory material for researchers who want to enter this field. Intelligent agents are covered in a few papers--each paper addresses a specific topic such as autonomous systems, multiagent systems, artifacts, and tools. The paper on affective intelligence has a strong interdisciplinary setting: it covers the subject from both psychological and computational points of view. Also clearly written, the paper on user profiling adequately describes the current progress in the field. The paper on multilingual knowledge management describes problems related to information systems that store and retrieve textual information in different languages. Two papers are concerned with the application of AI techniques to two main areas: healthcare systems and supply chains.

The topics discussed are closely related to the aforementioned technical committee’s research. Hence, although this collection is well written, it provides only a partial perspective on AI.