Applied artificial intelligence researchers have been focusing on developing and employing methods and systems to solve real-life problems in all areas including engineering, science, industry, automation & robotics, business & finance, cyberspace, and man–machine interactions. The 20th International Conference on Industrial, Engineering and Other Applications of Applied Intelligent Systems (IEA/AIE-2007) held in Kyoto, Japan presented such work performed by many scientists worldwide.

The previous IEA/AIE conference held in Japan was the Ninth International Conference on Industrial and Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Expert systems (IEA/AIE-1996) in Fukuoka in 1996. The duration of 11 years between two conferences demanded drastic changes around applied artificial intelligence research. The main causes are the rapid expansion of the Internet and the deluge of electronic and on-line text data. The Program Committee focused on Asian-originating technologies, such as active mining, integration of the Internet and broadcasting, chance discovery, real-world interactions, and fuzzy logic applications. The first four are from Japan and the last one is from Taiwan and China.

We received 462 papers from all parts of the world. Each paper was sent to at least three Program Committee members for review. Only 116 papers were selected for presentation and publication in the proceedings. We would like to express our sincere thanks to the Program Committee and all the reviewers for their hard work.

The papers in the proceedings cover the following topics: application systems, agent-based system chance discovery and social network, constraint satisfaction, data mining, e-commerce, education, fuzzy logic, fuzzy system applications, heuristic search genetic algorithm machine learning manufacturing, neural network, real-world interaction, robot, speech, text processing, vision, and other applications.