This volume reflects the state of the art in artificial intelligence in the Australasian region. It covers machine learning, knowledge acguisition, cognitive modelling, robots and vision, natural language, automated reasoning, knowledge-based systems, neural networks and genetic algorithms, distributed AI, etc.

The Portuguese Association for Arti cial Intelligence (APPIA) has been re- larly organising the Portuguese Conference on Arti cial Intelligence (EPIA). This ninth conference follows previous ones held in Porto (1985), Lisboa (1986), Braga (1987), Lisboa (1989), Albufeira (1991), Porto (1993), Funchal (1995) and Coimbra (1997). Starting in 1989, the conferences have been held biennially (alternating with an APPIA Advanced School on Arti cial Intelligence) and become truly international: English has been adopted as the o cial language and the proceedings are published in Springer’s LNAI series. The conference has recon rmed its high international standard this year, largely due to its programme committee, composed of distinguished researchers in a variety of specialities in Arti cial Intelligence, half of them from Portuguese universities. This has attracted a signi cant international interest, well expressed by the number of papers submitted (66), from 17 di erent countries, 29 of which are by Portuguese researchers. From the 66 papers submitted, about one third of them (23) were selected for oral presentation and have been published in this volume. The review process enabled the selection of high quality papers, each paper being reviewed by two or three reviewers, either from the programme committee or by their appointment. We would like to thank all of the reviewers for their excellent and hard work.

Designing is one of the most significant of human acts. Surprisingly, given that designing has been occurring for many millenia, our understanding of the processes of designing is remarkably limited. Recently, design methods have been formalised not as humano-centred processes but as processes capable of computer implementation with the goal of augmenting human designers. This volume contains contributions which cover design methods based on evolutionary systems, generative processes, evaluation methods and analysis methods. It presents the state of the art in formal design methods for computer aided design.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AI 2002, held in Canberra, Australia in December 2002. The 62 revised full papers and 12 posters presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 117 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on natural language and information retrieval, knowledge representation and reasoning, deduction, learning theory, agents, intelligent systems. Bayesian reasoning and classification, evolutionary algorithms, neural networks, reinforcement learning, constraints and scheduling, neural network applications, satisfiability reasoning, machine learning applications, fuzzy reasoning, and case-based reasoning.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, PRICAI '96, held in Cairns, Queensland, Australia in August 1996. The 56 revised full papers included in the book were carefully selected for presentation at the conference from a total of 175 submissions. The topics covered are machine learning, interactive systems, knowledge representation, reasoning about change, neural nets and uncertainty, natural language, constraint satisfaction and optimization, qualitative reasoning, automated deduction, nonmonotonic reasoning, intelligent agents, planning, and pattern recognition.

Many robotics researchers consider high-level vision algorithms (computational) too expensive for use in robot guidance. This book introduces the reader to an alternative approach to perception for autonomous, mobile robots. It explores how to apply methods of high-level computer vision and fuzzy logic to the guidance and control of the mobile robot. The book introduces a knowledge-based approach to vision modeling for robot guidance, where advantage is taken of constraints of the robot's physical structure, the tasks it performs, and the environments it works in. This facilitates high-level computer vision algorithms such as object recognition at a speed that is sufficient for real-time navigation. The texts presents algorithms that exploit these constraints at all levels of vision, from image processing to model construction and matching, as well as shape recovery. These algorithms are demonstrated in the navigation of a wheeled mobile robot.