Future technical systems will be companion systems, competent assistants that provide their functionality in a completely individualized way, adapting to a users capabilities, preferences, requirements, and current needs, and taking into account both the emotional state and the situation of the individual user.

This book presents the enabling technology for such systems. It introduces a variety of methods and techniques to implement an individualized, adaptive, flexible, and robust behavior for technical systems by means of cognitive processes, including perception, cognition, interaction, planning, and reasoning. The technological developments are complemented by empirical studies from psychological and neurobiological perspectives.

Multilevel Knowledge Processing in Companion Systems.- Extending the Knowledge Base: Dynamic Query Planning for Querying Ontologies.- User-Centered Planning.- Explaining System-Generated Plans to Human Users.- Neurobiological Foundations of Strategy Change.- Assistive and Adaptive Dialogue Management.- The 'How' ofCompanion Feedback: Insights from Functional Imaging and Psychophysiology.- Management of Multimodal User Interaction in Companion Systems.- User-Adapted Guided Information Exploration.- Last Minute: An Empirical Experiment in User Companion Interaction.- Semantic and Nonlinguistic Data Representing Emotional States.- Environment Adaption for Companion Systems.- Emotion Recognition from Speech.- Automated Analysis of Human Facial Expression and Affect.- Social Signal Processing and Analysis in Companion Systems.- Nonintrusive Gesture Recognition in Real Companion Environments.- Companions Personalized Emotion Experience Model (COMPLEX).- Information Fusion.- NeuralMechanisms and Methods for Emotion Recognition.- Mobile Worker Assistance System and Interaction Methods for Automotive Application Scenarios.