Advances in artificial intelligence

Followingalongtraditionofexcellence,theseventeentheditionoftheconference of the Canadian Society for the Computational Studies of Intelligence continued the success of its predecessors. This edition re?ected the energy and diversity of the Canadian AI community and the many international partnerships that this community has successfully established. AI 2004 attracted high-quality submissions from Canada and around the world. All papers submitted were thoroughly reviewed by the program comm- tee. Eachpaperwasassignedtoatleastthreeprogramcommitteemembers. Out of105submissionstothemainconference,29paperswereincludedasfullpapers inthisvolume,and22asshort/positionpapers. Threeworkshopsandagraduate symposium were also associated with AI 2004. In this volume, 14 papers selected from 21 submissions to the graduate symposium have been included. We invited three distinguished researchers to give talks representing their active research in AI: Fahiem Bacchus, Michael Littman, and Manuela Veloso. It would have been impossible to organize such a successful conference wi- out the help of many individuals. We would like to express our appreciation to the authors of the submitted papers, and to the program committee members and external referees who provided timely and signi?cant reviews. In particular, we would like to thank Luis Rueda for organizing the reviewing of the graduate symposium submissions, and Eric Mulvaney for providing valuable assistance in thepreparationoftheproceedings. Tomanagethesubmissionandreviewingp- cess we used CyberChair developed by Richard van de Stadt. Christine Gun ¨ ther from Springer has patiently attended to many editorial details. We owe special thanks to Bob Mercer for handling the local arrangements.