Current Topics in Artificial Intelligence

TheSpanish Associationfor Arti?cialIntelligence(AEPIA) wasfounded in1983 aiming to encourage the development of arti?cial intelligence in Spain. AEPIA is a member of the ECCAI (European Co-ordinating Committee for Arti?cial Intelligence) and a founder member of IBERAMIA, the Iberoamerican Conf- ence on Arti?cial Intelligence. Under the succesive presidencies of Jos´ e Cuena, FranciscoGarijoandFedericoBarber,theassociationgrewtoitspresenthealthy state. Since 1985, AEPIA has held a conference (CAEPIA) every second year. Since 1995 a Workshop on Technology Transfer of Arti?cial Intelligence (TTIA) has taken place together with CAEPIA. The CAEPIA-TTIA conferences were traditionally held mostly in Spanish and the proceedings were also published in our language. However, in order to promote an even more fruitful exchange of experiences with the international scienti?ccommunity,thedecisionwasmadetopublishapostproceedingsEnglish volume with the best contributions to CAEPIA-TTIA 2003. In fact, 214 papers were submitted from 19 countries and 137 were presented at the conference. From these, 66 were selected and were published in this book; that also includes an invited talk paper. We must express our gratitude to all the authors who submitted their papers to our conference. The paperswere reviewedby an internationalcommittee formed by 80 m- bers from 13 countries. Each paper was reviewed by two or three referees, with an average of 2.7 reviews per paper. The papers included in this volume were submitted to a second review process. We must also express our deepest gr- itude to all the researchers whose invaluable contributions guaranteed a high scienti?c level for the conference.