In July 1974, a “Summer Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour” organised by the AISB was held in Brighton. It featured the presentation of 21 contributed papers and three invited talks.

Although the name and acronym were not adopted until 1982, this important milestone in the history of AI is now thought of as the 1st European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI). The convention of thinking of the 1974 conference as the first ECAI dates back to 1984, when what the organisers called the “6th” ECAI was held in Pisa. This means that in 2024, we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of ECAI.

This volume represents the proceedings of the 50th-anniversary edition of ECAI, the 27th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in Santiago de Compostela from the 19th to the 24th of October 2024, under the motto of “celebrating the past, inspiring the future”. ECAI-2024 is organised by the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI) and the Spanish Association for Artificial Intelligence (AEPIA), and hosted by the Research Centre on Intelligent Technologies of the University of Santiago de Compostela (CiTIUS).

This is not the first time that plans have been made for the ECAI to come to Santiago de Compostela. The 2020 edition was due to be hosted here, but had to be moved online owing to the Covid-19 pandemic. We are therefore looking forward all the more to welcoming the AI community of Europe and the world to Santiago, a city which has been famous for centuries as both a travel destination and a meeting place.

The field of AI has grown enormously since 1974. A total of 2,344 paper submissions were received for the main track of the conference (acceptance rate 23%), and a further 57 for the demo track (acceptance rate 32%). Submissions covered all areas of AI, including planning, search, constraints, satisfiability, knowledge representation, uncertainty, data mining, machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, multiagent systems, and robotics. A significant number of submissions focused on multi- and interdisciplinary aspects, including the interplay between humans and machines, as well as matters relating to fairness, ethics, and trust.

Following a long tradition, this edition of ECAI will be held alongside the 13th edition of the Conference on Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems (PAIS), for which 71 submissions were received (acceptance rate 49%). PAIS provides an important forum for academic and industrial researchers and practitioners to share experiences and insights on the applicability, development, and deployment of intelligent systems.

This volume includes the peer-reviewed papers accepted for presentation at both ECAI and PAIS, as well as eight invited papers on Frontiers in AI. These invited papers correspond to short invited talks by members of the AI community currently doing particularly exciting and innovative work, the idea being to highlight important new results, techniques, and trends in our field. This volume also includes the abstracts of 14 papers recently published in one of the two leading discipline-wide journals in AI, namely Artificial Intelligence (AIJ) and the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), but which have not previously been presented at a conference with archival proceedings.

We look forward to a rich scientific programme that is bound to stimulate fruitful discussion about recent progress, as well as the future of the field. Besides the presentation of the papers included in this volume, the programme will include a variety of panels and special sessions on topics of wider interest to the AI community. Plenary keynote addresses will be delivered by Iryna Gurevych, Marijn Heule, César A. Hidalgo, and Iolanda Leite. The PAIS invited talk will be given by Nirmalie Wiratunga, and the EurAI Dissertation Award talk by Andrea Campagner.

The main conference will be preceded by a similarly rich pre-conference programme, running throughout the weekend. This will include the doctoral consortium, providing PhD students in AI with an opportunity to meet and interact closely with their peers from across the globe, as well as a varied programme of satellite workshops and tutorials, a list of which is included in this volume.

Not only is ECAI one of the major scientific events in AI, it is also an event that aims to facilitate interaction between attendees, as well as introducing them to local culture, gastronomy, music, history, and architecture. This edition will be no exception, Santiago de Compostela being the capital of Galicia and home to one of the oldest universities in the world, founded in 1495.

Organising a large scientific conference such as ECAI is a community effort, and we owe a great debt of gratitude to many individuals and organisations. To start with, we would like to thank the members of the EurAI Board for their trust, and its president Carles Sierra for his frequent advice over the past year or so.

More than 2,800 members of the international AI community have contributed their time and expertise to the peer-review process which enabled us to select the very best work for presentation at the conference. You will find their names listed on the following pages. In addition, many senior members of the community have kindly provided their confidential advice on numerous occasions.

As chair of the demo track, Reyhan Aydoan coordinated the selection of demo papers, while Gregor Behnke took responsibility for the journal track. Noa Agmon and Michela Milano put together an exciting programme of workshops, and Gabriele Röger and Margret Keuper organised the selection of a diverse range of tutorials. The all-important doctoral consortium is being chaired by Fernando P. Santos and Anaëlle Wilczynski, while as diversity-and-inclusion chairs, Isabel Neto and Samia Touileb have been working towards creating extra opportunities for networking, starting new collaborations, and for the exchange of ideas in an informal setting. As publicity chair, Luis Magdalena helped greatly in publicising ECAI and its many initiatives. Pedro Larrañaga organised the Lunch with a EurAI Fellow programme, whereby PhD students are able to interact closely with some of the most senior representatives of our field. Simon Rey and Diogo Carvalho have done an outstanding job as workflow managers, implementing a variety of tools which have allowed the work done by the programme committee to scale to the level required for a conference of the size of ECAI. Finally, we are most grateful to the many members of the local team in Santiago de Compostela for many crucial contributions to the organisation of the conference.

Organising ECAI was made possible by the exceptional support we received from the governments of the city of Santiago de Compostela, the province of A Coruña, Galicia, and Spain, and the sponsorship of a good number of companies and organisations who partnered with us for this event. We sincerely thank all of them for their support.

Last but not least, we must thank the countless members of the AI community who submitted their work to ECAI and PAIS and who will be joining us in Santiago de Compostela to celebrate the 50th anniversary of ECAI. We look forward to celebrating with you!

Ulle Endriss, Francisco S. Melo, Kerstin Bach, Alberto Bugarín-Diz, José M. Alonso-Moral, Senén Barro, and Fredrik Heintz

September 2024