AI 2004: Advances in Artificial Intelligence

AI 2004 was the seventeenth in the series of annual Australian arti?cial intel- gence conferences. This conference is the major forum for arti?cial intelligence research in Australia. It has consistently attracted strong international part- ipation. This year more than two thirds of the submissions were from outside Australia. The current volume is based on the proceedings of AI 2004. A total of 340 papers were submitted, which we believe to be a substantial increase on p- vious submission numbers to this series. A national and international program committee refereed full-length versions of all submitted papers. Each accepted paperwasreviewedbyatleastthreereviewers.Ofthese340submissions,78were accepted for oral presentation and a further 62 for poster presentation. This v- ume contains a regular paper of up to 12 pages length for each oral presentation and a short paper of up to 6 pages length for each poster presentation. In addition to the scienti?c track represented here, the conference featured an exciting program of tutorials and workshops, and plenary talks by four o- standinginvitedspeakers:MehranSahami(GoogleInc.andStanfordUniversity, USA), Michael J. Pazzani (National Science Foundation and University of Ca- fornia, Irvine, USA), Paul Compton (University of New South Wales, Australia) andAhChungTsoi(AustralianResearchCouncil,Australia).AI2004wascol- cated with Complex 2004, the 7th Asia-Paci?c Conference on Complex Systems, with the aim of promoting cross-fertilization and collaboration in areas of c- plex and intelligent systems.