Advances in Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

PrefaceFollowing a long tradition of excellence, the seventeenth edition of the conference of the Canadian Society for the Computational Studies of Intelligence continued the success of its predecessors. This edition reflected the energy and diversity of the Canadian AI community and the many international partnerships that this community has successfully established.AI 2004 attracted high-quality submissions from Canada and around the world. All papers submitted were thoroughly reviewed by the program committee. Each paper was assigned to at least three program committee members. Out of 105 submissions to the main conference, 29 papers were included as full papers in this volume, and 22 as short/position papers. Three workshops and a graduate symposium were also associated with AI 2004. In this volume, 14 papers selected from 21 submissions to the graduate symposium have been included. We invited three distinguished researchers to give talks representing their active research in AI: Fahiem Bacchus, Michael Littman, and Manuela Veloso.It would have been impossible to organize such a successful conference without the help of many individuals. We would like to express our appreciation to the authors of the submitted papers, and to the program committee members and external referees who provided timely and significant reviews. In particular, we would like to thank Luis Rueda for organizing the reviewing of the graduate symposium submissions, and Eric Mulvaney for providing valuable assistance in the preparation of the proceedings. To manage the submission and reviewing process we used CyberChair developed by Richard van de Stadt. Christine Günther from Springer has patiently attended to many editorial details. We owe special thanks to Bob Mercer for handling the local arrangements. Last, but not least, we would like to thank the General Chair, Kay Wiese and all the steering committee members for all their tremendous efforts in making AI 2004 a successful conference.