The Fifth Symposium for Artificial Intelligence Researchers (STAIRS 2010) took place in conjunction with the 19th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2010), as well as the Sixth Conference on Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems (PAIS 2010), in Lisbon, Portugal, 16–20 August 2010.

STAIRS is an international meeting intended to support AI researchers from all countries at the beginning of their career: PhD students or those who have held a PhD for less than one year. STAIRS offers doctoral students and young post-doctoral AI fellows a unique and valuable opportunity to gain experience in presenting their work in a supportive scientific environment, where they can obtain constructive feedback on the technical content of their work as well as advice on how to present it, and where they can also establish contacts with the broader European AI research community.

Papers selected by the program committee through a peer-review process were presented at the conference. The topics covered a broad spectrum of subjects in the field of AI: learning and classification, ontologies and the semantic web, agent programming and planning, logic and reasoning, economic approaches, games, dialogue systems, user preferences and recommender systems.

This book contains revised versions of most of the peer-reviewed papers presented at the conference. The final versions of the papers were submitted after the conference, giving the authors an opportunity to take account of any feedback they received during the conference, and improve their contributions accordingly.

I would like to thank the ECAI chairs for supporting STAIRS and for creating a perfect environment for it, as well as the local organisers and the STAIRS participants. Last but not least, I am grateful to the STAIRS program committee for their work in selecting papers and providing feedback to the authors. They were:

Natasha Alechina, Josep Lluis Arcos, Yoram Bachrach, Sylvain Bouveret, Rui Camacho, Hubie Chen, Fabio Gagliardi Cozman, Claudia d'Amato, Eric de la Clergerie, Sarah Jane Delany, Clare Dixon, Esra Erdem, Daan Fierens, Chiara Ghidini, Wojtek Jamroga, Ian Kash, Udo Kruschwitz, Oliver Kutz, Nicolas Lachiche, Nada Lavrac, Francesca Alessandra Lisi, Weiru Liu, Alessio Lomuscio, Peter Lucas, Peter McBurney, Elena Montiel-Ponsoda, Eva Onaindia, Nardine Osman, Hector Palacios, Jeff Z. Pan, Henri Prade, Marta Sabou, David Schlangen, Carles Sierra, Matthijs Spaan, Kostas Stergiou, Heiner Stuckenschmidt, Anni-Yasmin Turhan, Menno van Zaanen, Kalliopi Zervanou, Wamberto Vasconcelos, Stefan Woelfl

Bergen, September 2010,

Thomas Ågotnes