Advances in Computer Science - ASIAN 2004, Higher Level Decision Making

The9thAsianComputingScienceConferencewasheldinChiangMaiinDec- ber 2004. This volume contains papers that were presented at that conference. The conference was dedicated to Jean-Louis Lassez, on the occasion of his ?fth cycle (60th year) birthday. Its theme was "higher-level decision-making". Philippe Flajolet was invited to give the opening keynote address, while Yuzuru Tanaka and Phillip Rogaway were also keynote speakers. In addition to the keynote speakers, distinguished colleagues of Jean-Louis Lassez were - vited to present talks in his honour. Many of those talks are represented by papers in this volume, but I would like to thank all those speakers: Jonathan Bernick Alex Brodsky Vijay Chandru T. Y. Chen Norman Foo Martin Golumbic Richard Helm Claude Kirchner H' el' ene Kirchner Kim Marriott Krishna Palem Kotagiri Ramamohanarao Vijay Saraswat Masahiko Sato R. K. Shyamasundar Nicolas Spyratos Andrew Sung Pascal Van Hentenryck Jean Vuillemin Following a call for papers, 75 papers were submitted, comprising 47 from Asia, 13 from Europe, 8 from Australia, 5 from North America, and 2 from the Middle East. Submissions came from a total of 23 countries. Korea, China and Thailand were the most-represented countries. These papers underwent ano- mous refereeing before the Program Committee selected 17 papers for presen- tion at the conference. I thank the Program Committee for doing an excellent job under severe time pressure. I thank the General Chairs of the conference, Joxan Ja?ar and Kanchana Kanchanasut, for their support.