When in October 1996 in Cholula (Puebla, Mexico), I took charge of organizing the scienti?c program of the next Ibero-American Congress on Arti?cial Intel- gence (IBERAMIA 98) I bet on a couple of ideas. First, I adopted the spirit of the Portuguese adventurers to get the Sixth Congress on a truly international track. In order to attain this aim I needed to convince everybody that the Ibero- American AI community had improved over the years and attained a very good level in what concerns individuals. Second, I brought my colleagues beside me so that we were able to collect su?cient excellent papers without destroying the pioneering spirit of those who ?rst inaugurated the Congress. Getting together to ?nd out what is in progress in the vast region in which Latin languages (P- tuguese and Spanish) are spoken, attracting others to exchange ideas with us, and by doing this advancing AI in general, is a risky untertaking. This book is the result, and it sets a new standard to be discussed by all of us. IBERAMIA was established in 1988 (Barcelona) by three Ibero-American AI Associations (AEPIA from Spain, SMIA from Mexico, and APPIA from Por- gal), after a ?rst meeting in Morelia (Mexico) in 1986 of SMIA and AEPIA.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AI'97, held in Perth, Australia, in November/December 1997. The volume presents 48 revised full papers selected from a total of 143 submissions. Also included are three keynote talks and one invited paper. The book is divided into topical sections on constraint satisfaction and scheduling, computer vision, distributed AI, evolutionary computing, knowledge-based systems, knowledge representation and reasoning, learning and machine vision, machine learning, NLP and user modeling, neural networks, robotics and machine recognition, and temporal qualitative reasoning.

The 8th Ibero-American Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IBERAMIA 2002, took place in Spain for the second time in 14 years; the first conference was organized in Barcelona in January 1988. The city of Seville hosted this 8th conference, giving the participants the opportunity of enjoying the richness of its historical and cultural atmosphere. Looking back over these 14 years, key aspects of the conference, such as its structure, organization, the quantity and quality of submissions, the publication policy, and the number of attendants, have significantly changed. Some data taken from IBERAMIA’88 and IBERAMIA 2002 may help to illustrate these changes. IBERAMIA’88 was planned as an initiative of three Ibero-American AI associations: the Spanish Association for AI (AEPIA), the Mexican Association for AI (SMIA), and the Portuguese Association for AI (APIA). The conference was organized by the AEPIA staff, including the AEPIA president, José Cuena, the secretary, Felisa Verdejo, and other members of the AEPIA board. The proceedings of IBERAMIA’88 contain 22 full papers grouped into six areas: knowledge representation and reasoning, learning, AI tools, expert systems, language, and vision. Papers were written in the native languages of the participants: Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan. Twenty extended abstracts describing ongoing projects were also included in the proceedings.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Learning Classifier Systems, IWLCS 2001, held in San Francisco, CA, USA, in July 2001. The 12 revised full papers presented together with a special paper on a formal description of ACS have gone through two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The first part of the book is devoted to theoretical issues of learning classifier systems including the influence of exploration strategy, self-adaptive classifier systems, and the use of classifier systems for social simulation. The second part is devoted to applications in various fields such as data mining, stock trading, and power distributionn networks.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention, MICCAI'98, held in Cambridge, MA, USA, in October 1998. The 134 revised papers presented were carefully selected from a total of 243 submissions. The book is divided into topical sections on surgical planning, surgical navigation and measurements, cardiac image analysis, medical robotic systems, surgical systems and simulators, segmentation, computational neuroanatomy, biomechanics, detection in medical images, data acquisition and processing, neurosurgery and neuroscience, shape analysis, feature extraction, registration, and ultrasound.

The two-volume set originates from the Advanced Course on Petri Nets held in Dagstuhl, Germany in September 1996; beyond the lectures given there, additional chapters have been commissioned to give a well-balanced presentation of the state of the art in the area. Together with its companion volume "Lectures on Petri Nets II: Applications" this book is the actual reference for the area and addresses professionals, students, lecturers, and researchers who are - interested in systems design and would like to learn to use Petri nets familiar with subareas of the theory or its applications and wish to view the whole area - interested in learning about recent results presented within a unified framework - planning to apply Petri nets in practical situations - interested in the relationship of Petri nets to other models of concurrent systems.

The two-volume set originates from the Advanced Course on Petri Nets held in Dagstuhl, Germany in September 1996; beyond the lectures given there, additional chapters have been commissioned to give a well-balanced presentation of the state of the art in the area. Together with its companion volume "Lectures on Petri Nets I: Basic Models" this book is the actual reference for the area and addresses professionals, students, lecturers, and researchers who are - interested in systems design and would like to learn to use Petri nets familiar with subareas of the theory or its applications and wish to view the whole area - interested in learning about recent results presented within a unified framework - planning to apply Petri nets in practical situations - interested in the relationship of Petri nets to other models of concurrent systems.