AI 2004 : Advances in artificial intelligence ; 17th Australian Joint conference on artificial intelligence, Cairns, Australia, December 4-6, 2004, proceedings

AI 2004 was the seventeenth in the series of annual Australian artificial intelli-gence conferences. This conference is the major forum for artificial intelligenceresearch in Australia. It has consistently attracted strong international partic-ipation. This year more than two thirds of the submissions were from outsideAustralia.The current volume is based on the proceedings of AI 2004. AI 2004 was collo-cated with Complex 2004, the 7th Asia-Pacific Conference on Complex Systems,with the aim of promoting cross-fertilization and collaboration in areas of com-plex and intelligent systems