Advances in Artificial Intelligence

AI2000 was the 13th in the series of biennial Arti cial Intelligence conf- ences sponsored by the Canadian Society for Computational Studies of Int- ligence/Soci et e canadienne pour l' etude de l'intelligence par ordinateur. For the rst time, the conference was held in conjunction with four other conferences. TwooftheseweretheannualconferencesoftwootherCanadiansocieties,Gra- icsInterface(GI2000)andVisionInterface(VI2000),withwhichthisconference has been associated in recent years. The other two conferences were the Int- national Symposium on Robotics (ISR2000) and the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems conference (IRIS2000). It is our hope that the overall ex- rience will be enriched by this conjunction of conferences. The Canadian AI conference has a 25 year tradition of attracting Canadian and international papers of high quality from a variety of AI research areas. All papers submitted to the conference received three independent reviews. - proximately one third were accepted for plenary presentation at the conference. A journal version of the best paper of the conference will be invited to appear in Computational Intelligence. The conference attracted submissions from six continents, and this diversity is represented in these proceedings. The overall framework is similar to that of the last conference, AI'98. Plenary presentations were given of 25 papers, organized into sessions based on topics. Poster pres- tations were given for an additional 13 papers. A highlight of the conference continues to be the invited speakers. Three speakers, Eugene Charniak, Eric _ Horvitz, and Jan Zytkow, were our guests this year.