This year, 2011, is very special for the national research community working on Artificial Intelligence (AI): the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) was held in Barcelona, and the Catalan Association for Artificial Intelligence (ACIA) played a key role in the organization of the event. With more than 1400 participants, the IJCAI in Barcelona has been indeed the most attended IJCAI of the last 20 years.

Despite the significance and symbolism of IJCAI, the Catalan AI community gathered also for its annual conference, which this year reaches its 14th edition. The 14th International Conference of the Catalan Association for Artificial Intelligence, CCIA-2011, has been held at the Universitat de Lleida, from October 26th to October 28th, and has been organized by the AI groups of Universitat de Lleida (UdL) and Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), and the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA-CSIC).

CCIA is a conference intended to bring together researchers from different areas of the Catalan-speaking AI community, and promote the cooperation among the local research groups. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to agents and multi-agents systems, constraints and satisfiability, evolutionary computing, knowledge representation, machine learning, natural language, planning, reasoning models, robotics, search, and uncertainty.

This book contains the papers accepted for presentation at CCIA-2011. All the received submissions were carefully reviewed by the Program Committee, and each paper received three independent reviews. Out of 28 submissions, 24 papers were accepted for inclusion in the book and for oral presentation at the conference. The conference program also featured invited talks by two outstanding international researchers: Christian Bessière (CNRS, Université de Montpellier, France), and Bart Selman (Cornell University, USA).

We would like to express our sincere gratitude to the authors of the contributed papers, to the invited speakers for their enlightening talks, to the Program Committee and the additional reviewers for their careful and thorough work, to the Publicity Chair for promoting the conference and developing the webpage, and to the Organizing Committee for taking care of the organization of the event itself.

Our special thanks go also to the president of ACIA, Vicenç Torra, who asked us to serve as Local Arrangement Chair, Program Chair, and General Chair of CCIA-2011.

Financial and organizational support was generously provided by Diputació de Lleida, Universitat de Lleida (UdL), Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), and the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA-CSIC).

We hope that the present book gives a glimpse of current AI research in Catalonia, and inspires new ideas and further work.

Lleida, October 2011

Cèsar Fernández (UdL), Local Arrangement Chair

Hector Geffner (ICREA & UPF), Program Chair

Felip Manyà (IIIA-CSIC), General Chair