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Front Matter
i - xiii
Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications
Volume 131: Artificial Intelligence Research and Development
Preface

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been from its beginning the wave of evolution in computer science. It is in good health and a proof of it is the fact that many companies qualify its novelties as ‘smart’ or ‘intelligent’ independently of the features included in them; the term ‘society of knowledge’ has been imposed to draw society nearer to the future and a symbol of breakthrough. From this perspective, AI has reached its maturity and it has exploded into an endless set of sub-areas, getting in touch with all other disciplines to assist situation assessment, analysis and interpretation of music, management of environmental and biological systems, planning trains, routing of communication networks, assisting medical diagnosis or powering auctions.

The wide variety of Artificial Intelligence application areas has meant that AI researchers often become scattered in different micro specialized conferences. There are few occasions where the AI research community joins together, while computer scientists and engineers can find a lot of interesting ideas from the cross fertilization of results coming from all of these application areas. The Catalan Association for Artificial Intelligence (ACIA

ACIA, the Catalan Association for Artificial Intelligence, is member of the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI). http://www.acia.org.

) is aware of the benefit of this contact and with this aim it organizes an annual conference to promote synergies in the research community of its influence. This book provides a representative selection of papers resulting from this activity. The advances made by ACIA people and its influence area have been gathered in this single volume as an update of previous volumes published in 2003 and 2004 (corresponding to series numbers 100 and 113).

The book is organized according to the different sessions in which the papers were presented at the Eighth Catalan Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in Alguer (Italy) on October 26–28th, 2005. Namely: Neural Networks, Computer Vision, Applications, Machine Learning, Reasoning, Planning and Robotics, and Multi-Agent Systems. Papers have been selected after a double blind review process in which distinguished AI researchers from all over Europe participated. Among the 77 papers received, 26 were selected as oral presentations and 25 as posters. The quality of the papers was high on average, and the selection between an oral or a poster session was based on the degree of discussion that a paper could generate more than on its quality. All of the papers collected in this volume would be of interest to any computer scientist or engineer interested in AI.

We would like to express our sincere gratitude to all the authors and members of the scientific and organizing committees that have made this conference a success. Our special thanks also to the plenary speakers for their effort in preparing the lectures.

Alghero, October 2005, Beatriz López (University of Girona), Joaquim Meléndez (University of Girona), Petia Radeva (Computer Vision Center, UAB), Jordi Vitrià (Computer Vision Center, UAB)

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