The Sixth European Starting AI Researchers' Symposium (STAIRS 2012) took place in conjunction with the 20th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2012), the Seventh Conference on Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems (PAIS 2012) as well as the Sixth International Symposium on Rules (RuleML 2012) in Montpellier, France, 27-28 August 2012.

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 symposium. The topics covered a broad spectrum of subjects in the field of AI: machine learning and data mining, constraint satisfaction problems and belief propagation, logic and resoning, dialogue and multi-agent systems, and games and planning. We had 48 submissions, of which 32 were eventually accepted for inclusion in the proceedings. To ensure the quality of the reviewing process, each paper received three reviews, and each reviewer had a quota of no more than 3 papers to review. Finally, the program committee co-chairs read borderline papers and reviewers' comments to make confident decisions for all papers.

In addition to submitted papers, we were excited to have five keynotes: Alan Bundy (University of Edinburgh), Gemma C. Garriga (INRIA Lille Nord Europe), Malte Helmert (University of Basel), Andreas Krause (ETH Zurich), and Michele Sebag (Universitè Paris Sud). We thank them for their great contributions to the program and goals of STAIRS. We would also like to thank the ECAI program commitee chair Luc De Raedt and the ECAI organizing committee chair Christian Bessiere for supporting STAIRS and for creating a perfect environment for it, as well as the local organization team. Our special thanks go to the STAIRS program committee for their work in selecting papers and providing feedback to the authors. They were:

Thomas Ågotnes, Babak Ahmadi, Natasha Alechina, Josep Lluis Arcos, Kai Arras, Roman Barták, Christian Bauckhage, Maren Bennewitz, Elizabeth Black, Sylvain Bouveret, Oliver Brock, Rui Camacho, Hubie Chen, Amanda Clare, Alvaro Collet, Fabio G. Cozman, Claudia D'Amato, Eric De La Clergerie, Sarah J. Delany, Clare Dixon, Anca Dragan, Esra Erdem, Shaheen Fatima, Alan Fern, Daan Fierens, Chiara Ghidini, Guillaume Infantes, Andreas Karwath, Ian Kash, Angelika Kimmig, Udo Kruschwitz, Oliver Kutz, Tobias Lang, Wenwen Li, Francesca A. Lisi, Weiru Liu, Manuel Lopes, Matthew Molineaux, Katarzyna Musial, Sriraam Natarajan, Mathias Niepert, Eva Onaindia, Hector Palacios, Novi Quadrianto, Achim Rettinger, Matthijs Spaan, Cyrill Stachniss, Kostas Stergiou, Florent Teichteil-Königsbuch, Matthias Thimm, Rudolph Triebel, Anni-Yasmin Turhan, Menno Van Zaanen, Wamberto Vasconcelos, Stefan Woelfl, Stefan Wrobel, Rong Zhou, Inon Zuckerman

Also many thanks to the auxiliary reviewers Nicola Fanizzi, Tias Guns, Pasquale Minervini, Marco Montali, Sergio Pajares, and Domenico Redavid. The work and help of the program committee and auxiliary reviewers are essential to the success of this symposium. The reviews that we received were of general high quality and included constructive comments to help the authors improve upon their papers.

Last but not least, we would like to thank all authors who submitted their work to this symposium. Thanks!

Bonn and Berlin, June 2012

Kristian Kersting

Marc Toussaint