The AI 2003 conference was the 16th in the series of artificial intelligence conferences sponsored by the Canadian Society for Computational Studies of Intelligence (CSCSI)/Soci´et´e Canadienne pour l’Etude de l’Intelligence par Ordinateur (SCEIO). The conference showcases the excellent research work done by Canadians and their international colleagues. As in the case of many past Canadian AI conferences, AI 2003 was organized in conjunction with its sister Canadian conferences, Vision Interface (VI) and Graphics Interface (GI), enriching the experience for all participants. The conferences were held on the campus of Dalhousie University, at Canada’s largest Atlantic port city, Halifax.
This year, we received a record number of paper submissions. A total of 116 abstracts were received, out of which 106 papers were submitted by the due date. As at past conferences, there was strong international participation. Among the submitted papers, about 41% were from non-Canadian researchers. From the 106 papers, we accepted 30 full papers and 24 short papers. Following the success in AI 2002, the Graduate Student Symposium was continued in AI 2003, with 11 extended abstracts accepted from 16 submissions. All these accepted papers are included in this volume. They cover a wide range of topics, including knowledge
representation, search, constraint satisfaction, natural language, machine learning and data mining, reasoning under uncertainty, agent and multiagent systems, AI and Web applications, AI and bioinformatics, and AI and E-commerce.
We invited three distinguished researchers representing three very active subfields of AI: Victor Lesser (multiagent systems), Tom Mitchell (machine learning), and Pierre Baldi (AI and bioinformatics). The extended abstracts of their invited talks also appear in this volume.