| SBIA, the Brazilian Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, is a biennial event
intended to be the main forum of the AI community in Brazil. The SBIA 2004
was the 17th issue of the series initiated in 1984. Since 1995 SBIA has been
accepting papers written and presented only in English, attracting researchers
from all over the world. At that time it also started to have an international
program committee, keynote invited speakers, and proceedings published in the
Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) series of Springer (SBIA 1995,
Vol. 991, SBIA 1996, Vol. 1159, SBIA 1998, Vol. 1515, SBIA 2000, Vol. 1952,
SBIA 2002, Vol. 2507).
SBIA 2004 was sponsored by the Brazilian Computer Society (SBC). It was
held from September 29 to October 1 in the city of São Luis, in the northeast
of Brazil, together with the Brazilian Symposium on Neural Networks (SBRN).
This followed a trend of joining the AI and ANN communities to make the joint
event a very exciting one. In particular, in 2004 these two events were also held
together with the IEEE International Workshop on Machine Learning and Signal
Processing (MMLP), formerly NNLP.
The organizational structure of SBIA 2004 was similar to other international
scientific conferences. The backbone of the conference was the technical program
which was complemented by invited talks, workshops, etc. on the main AI topics.
The call for papers attracted 209 submissions from 21 countries. Each paper
submitted to SBIA was reviewed by three referees. From this total, 54 papers
from 10 countries were accepted and are included in this volume. This made
SBIA a very competitive conference with an acceptance rate of 25.8%. The
evaluation of this large number of papers was a challenge in terms of reviewing
and maintaining the high quality of the preceding SBIA conferences. All these
goals would not have been achieved without the excellent work of the members
of the program committee – composed of 80 researchers from 18 countries – and
the auxiliary reviewers. |
