Preface

Artificial Intelligence (AI) forms an essential branch of computer science. The field covered by the IA is multiform and gathers subjects as various as the engineering of knowledge, the automatic treatment of the language, the training, the systems multi-agents, to quote only some of them. The history of the AI knew various periods of evolution passing from periods of doubt at very fertile periods. AI is now in its maturity and did not remain an isolated field of computer science, but approached various fields like statistics, data analysis, linguistics and cognitive psychology or databases. AI is focused on providing solutions to real life problems and is used now in routine in medicine, economics, military or strategy games…

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.

), with the aim of joining together the researchers of the AI community, organizes an annual conference to promote synergies in the research community of its influence.

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, 2004 and 2005 (corresponding to numbers 100, 113 and 131 of the series “Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications”).

The book is organized according to the different sessions in which the papers were presented at the ninth International Conference of the Catalane Association for artificial Intelligence, held in Perpignan (France) on October 26–27th, 2006, namely: Machine Learning, Reasoning, Neural Networks, Computer Vision, Planning and Robotics and Multiagent Systems. For the first time this conference has been organized in the “French Catalonia” and we want to thank the ACIA for confidence that they granted to us. Papers have been selected after a double blind process in which distinguished AI researchers participated. The quality of papers was high on average. All the papers collected on 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. We also send special thanks to the invited speakers for their effort in preparing the lectures.

Perpignan, October 2006

Monique Polit (University of Perpignan), Joseph Aguilar-Martin (LAAS/CNRS, Toulouse), Beatriz López (University of Girona), Joaquim Meléndez (University of Girona)