The Seventeenth Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AI'2004)

ferences attracted more than 200 delegates. Three preconference workshops were affiliated with AI’2004: The Third Business Agents and the Semantic Web workshop, organized by Harold Boley, Scott Buffett, Bruce Spencer (National Research Council), Ali Ghorbani (University of New Brunswick), and Said Tabet (Macgregor Inc.); the First Agent Meets Robot workshop, organized by Hamada Ghenniwa, (University of Western Ontario), Weiming Shen (National Research Council) and Mohamed Kamel (University of Waterloo); and the First Causality and Causal Discovery workshop, organized by Kamran Karimi (University of Regina). In addition, the AI’2004 graduate symposium attracted many graduate students. These events turned the city of London into a Mecca for AI and computer science for several days during the middle of May. Issues related to agents, multiagent systems, and embedded agents were the focus of the Agents Meet Robots workshop, the BASeWeb workshop, and the first technical session of the main conference. In keeping with this theme, the invited talk by Manuela Veloso (Carnegie Mellon University) presented the AI challenges in multirobot soccer playing agents. Nearly half the technical papers presented at the conference dealt with different aspect of learning—including neural and evolutionary learning. Michael Littman’s (Rutgers University) invited talk dealt with applying rein■ AI’2004 was held at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario from May 17 to May 19, 2004. The conference was held jointly with the Computer and Robot Vision and Graphics Interface conferences. The three conferences attracted more than 200 attendees. Three workshops and a graduate symposium were held in conjunction with the technical sessions.