Sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
The AAAI-04 Conference was held in San Jose, California, at the San Jose Convention Center, from 25-29 July, 2004. There were 453 papers submitted for review to the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Another 63 were submitted to the Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference.
This year’s conference provides a comprehensive survey of the best research in the various areas within the field of artificial intel – ligence. Our goal is to provide you with five days of immersion in the wonderful variety of problems that the best researchers in the field are tackling. We hope you will find something to interest you throughout the entire conference, and that you will leave San Jose with your intellectual batteries recharged and ready for another year.
The conference’s highlight is the technical program. The papers in the technical program were selected by a highly competitive peer review process. Each paper was reviewed by three members of the program committee, supervised by a member of the senior program committee. The reviewing period was followed by discussion between reviewers, leading to an accept or reject recommendation. These recommendations were reviewed and approved by the senior program committee and program chairs in a face-to-face meeting. In all, out of 453 submitted papers, 120 were accepted and published. We hope you will agree with us that these papers represent significant contributions across a wide range of subject areas.
In addition, three papers were selected for special mention. The AAAI-04 Outstanding Paper award goes to Lin Liao, Dieter Fox, and Henry Kautz for their paper “Learning and Inferring Transportation Routines.” Honorable mention goes to Lee Joohyung and Lin Fangzhen for their paper “Loop Formulas for Circumscription,” and to Trausti Kristjansson, Aron Culotta, Paul Viola, and Andrew McCallum for their paper “Interactive Information Extraction with Constrained Conditional Random Fields.”
The technical program is the heart of the conference, and we would like to gratefully acknowledge the very substantial contributions of the program committee members, and particularly the members of the senior program committee who pulled everything together.
In addition to the technical program, AAAI-04 includes tutorials (organized by Mathew Stone), workshops (organized by Milos Hauskrecht and Dieter Fox), the student abstract program (organized by Avi Pfeffer and Mark Craven), the AAAI/SIGART Doctoral Consortium (organized by Robert St. Amant), intelligent systems demonstrations (organized by Chris Welty), and the robot competition and exhibition (organized by Bill Smart and Sheila Tejada). We would like to thank the organizers of these programs for their efforts, and we hope you will enjoy participating in them. We would also like to thank our invited speakers for sharing their ideas with us, and we hope you will enjoy their talks.
Finally, we would like to remind the AI community that this conference would not be the institution that it is without the neverending work of the AAAI staff, particularly Carol McKenna Hamilton, Keri Harvey, and Rick Skalsky. It has been a pleasure to work with them and serve the AI community. We hope you enjoy the show.
George Ferguson, University of Rochester and Deborah McGuinness, Stanford University