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First Announcement

ECAI 2004

16th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Valencia (Spain), August 22-27th, 2004

General Information

The 16th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2004)
will be held in Valencia, Spain, on August 22 through 27, 2004. The
conference will be hosted by the “Departamento de Sistemas
Informáticos y Computación” (DSIC) of the Universidad Politècnica de
Valencia.

ECAI is the more and more becoming a key reference point for assessing
a worldwide State-of-the-Art in Artificial Intelligence. The conference
brings together researchers from academy, software developers and users
from industry and public organizations, offering them invaluable
occasions to meet and exchange ideas, thus contributing to making real
  the upcoming “Information Society”.

Along with refereed paper presentations and invited talks by
prestigious speakers, the conference will offer, on August 22 through
24, 2004, workshops and tutorials on most advanced topics.

Following an established tradition, the Conference on Prestigious
Applications of Intelligent Systems (PAIS 2004) will run in parallel
with ECAI. Its aim is to give an overview of the most significant
real-world applications of Artificial Intelligence. The Programme
Committee Chairman of PAIS 2004 is Padraig Cunningham
([log in to unmask])

For the second time, after the success at ECAI 2002, ECAI 2004 will
also co-locate the Second STarting AI Researchers Symposium (STAIRS
2004), which aims to bring together doctoral students and young
post-doctoral AI researchers, giving them a real opportunity for
cross-fertilization between the experience of established leaders and
the learning desire of the next generation. The STAIRS 2004 Program
Committee co-chairs are Eva Onaindia ([log in to unmask]) and
Steffen Staab ([log in to unmask])

Location

The Conference will be located at the Computer Science School of the
Universidad Politécnica de Valencia. Further information about the
location can be found at the URL: http://www.dsic.upv.es/ecai2004.

Paper Submission

Submissions of substantial, original and previously unpublished work
are invited in all areas of Artificial Intelligence. Submission is a
two-stage process. Authors are asked to submit to the ECAI 2004 Program
Chair (see below) a brief summary of their paper by Friday, February
13, 2004, followed by their full paper by Wednesday, February 18, 2004
(23:59 CET). The strongly preferred submission method for summaries is
to use the web-based summary submission form. Submitted summaries will
be assigned a unique tracking number that should be marked on the full
paper submission. Authors without access to the web should send a
summary including the title, authors, contact address and abstract of
the paper (maximum 200 words), plus keywords to the ECAI 2004 Program
Chair, Lorenza Saitta (by e-mail or postal mail, see addresses below).
The summary information and the tracking number should also be included
with the paper itself, on a separate sheet of paper. Authors not able
to use the web-based submission form may omit the tracking number. The
strongly preferred submission method for full papers is electronically,
by e-mail. Only PDF files will be accepted. Submissions in hardcopy may
also be made if electronic submission is problematic for the authors.
In that case, six copies of the paper (each including the summary
sheet) should be sent by postal mail or courier service to the ECAI
2004 Program Chair, Lorenza Saitta. The deadline for receipt of papers
is 18 February 2004 (23:59 CET) for both electronic and hardcopy
submissions. Papers received after this date will not be reviewed.
Notification of receipt of full papers will be mailed to the
corresponding author soon after receipt.

The papers will undergo an anonymous reviewing process. Notification to
the authors is expected to start on May 2, 2004.

ECAI 2004 will not accept any paper which at the time of submission is
under review for, or has already been published or accepted for
publication in a journal or another conference. Authors are also
expected not to submit their papers elsewhere during the review period.
These restrictions only apply to journals and conferences and not to
workshops or similar specialised meetings with limited audiences. The
title page should include a statement that "this paper is not under
review or accepted for publication in another conference or journal".

It is highly recommended to submit papers using the final camera-ready
formatting style, except that author names should be omitted, and
replaced by the tracking number. Submissions must not exceed five pages
in camera-ready format. Submissions of unformatted papers are limited
to 6000 words including footnotes, figure captions, tables, appendices,
and bibliography. Each half-page of figures will be counted as 600
words. Overlengthy submissions will be rejected without review.
Authors submitting unformatted papers must include a word count on
their paper. Guidelines on the format of submissions will be available
on the ECAI 2004 web page soon. Final versions of accepted papers will
be required to conform strictly to the formatting requirements
specified in the ECAI 2004 Style Guide. Each accepted paper will be
allocated five pages in the proceedings. The proceedings will be
published by IOS Press on paper and as a CD-ROM. The deadline for
receipt of the camera-ready copy is May 31, 2004. At least one author
of each accepted paper is required to attend the conference to present
the paper.

As ECAI 2004 includes PAIS 2004 as a subconference, paper submission
dates and procedures for PAIS are the same as for ECAI; please, do not
submit papers directly to the Program Chair of PAIS. As papers
submitted to PAIS shall undergo a separate review process handled by
the Program Committee of PAIS, authors should clearly mark in the title
page that it is a PAIS submission.

Submission of Workshop and Tutorial propoals

Proposals submission for Workshops (deadline: November 1, 2003) and
Tutorials (deadline: December 1, 2003) should be sent electronically
(PDF files) to the respective Chair Persons.

All the details of the submission process will appear in the Conference
Web pages at URL:
http://www.dsic.upv.es/ecai2004/

Conference Chair
Ramon Lopez de Mantaras
IIIA - Artificial Intelligence Research Institute
CSIC, Bellaterra, Spain
[log in to unmask]


Program Chair
Lorenza Saitta
Università del Piemonte Orientale, Italy
[log in to unmask]


Local Chair
Vicente J. Botti Navarro
Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain
[log in to unmask]


Workshops Chair
José Miguel Benedí
Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain
[log in to unmask]

Tutorials Chair
Marie-Christien Rousset
  University of Paris-Sud
[log in to unmask]

Advisory Committee

Boi Falting (Switzerland)
Werner Horn (Austria)
Paolo Liberatore (Italy)
Rob Milne (UK)
Henri Prade (France)
Frank van Harmelen (The Netherlands)
Thierry Vidal (France)
Wolfgang Wahlster (Germany)


For further inquiries about ECAI or PAIS, please contact:
        [log in to unmask]

For further inquiries about STAIRS, please contact:
        [log in to unmask]


Important Dates:

Paper abstract submission : 13 February 2004
Full paper submission : 18 February 2004
Notification of acceptance : 2 May 2004
Final paper due : 31 May 2004
Workshop proposals : 1st November 2003
Tutorial proposals : 1st December 2003