| The Spanish Association for Artificial Intelligence (AEPIA) was founded in 1983 aiming to encourage the development of artificial intelligence in Spain. AEPIA is a member of the ECCAI (European Co-ordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence) and a founder member of IBERAMIA, the Iberoamerican Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Under the succesive presidencies of José Cuena, Francisco Garijo and Federico Barber, the association grew to its present healthy state. Since 1985, AEPIA has held a conference (CAEPIA) every second year. Since 1995 a Workshop on Technology Transfer of Artificial 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 scientific community, the decision was made to publish a postproceedings English 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 papers were reviewed by an international committee formed by 80 members 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 gratitude to all the researchers whose invaluable contributions guaranteed a high scientific level for the conference.
The conference was organized by the GALAN group of the Department of Computer Science, University of the Basque Country (EHU-UPV). We must mention that the Organizing Committee provided a really charming environment where researchers and practitioners could concentrate on the task of presenting and commenting on contributions.
The conference was supported by the liberal sponsorship of the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnologia, the Basque Government, the University of the Basque Country (Vicerrectorado del Campus de Gipuzkoa) and the Caja de Ahorros de Guipuzcoa-Kutxa. We thank them for the generous funding that allowed the presence of invited speakers and granted students. |
