AI 2002: Advances in Artificial Intelligence: 15th Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Canberra, Australia, December 2-6, 2002, Proceedings

AI 2002 is the 15th in the series of annual conferences on arti?cial intelligence held in Australia. This conference is the major forum for the presentation of arti?cial intelligence research in Australia, encompassing all aspects of that broad ?eld. It has traditionally attracted signi?cant international participation, as was again the case in 2002. The current volume is based on the proceedings of AI 2002. Full length ver- ons of all submitted papers were refereed by an international program committee, each paper receiving at least two independent reviews. As a result, 62 papers were selected for oral presentation in the conference, and 12 more for poster presentation, out of 117 submissions. One-page abstracts of the posters are - blished in this volume, along with the full papers selected for oral presentation. In addition to the scienti?c track represented here, the conference featured a program of tutorials and workshops, and plenary talks by ?ve invited sp- kers: Peter van Beek (University of Waterloo, Canada), Eric Bonabeau (I- system Corporation, USA), Ming Li (University of California at Santa Barbara), Bernhard Nebel (Albert-Ludwigs-Universit¿ at Freiburg, Germany) and Zoltan Somogyi (University of Melbourne, Australia). It was colocated with a number of related events: an AI Applications Symposium, the 6th Australia-Japan Joint Workshop on Intelligent and Evolutionary Systems, the Australasian Workshop on Computational Logic (AWCL), and the annual conference of the Australasian Association for Logic (AAL).