KI 2001: Advances in Artificial Intelligence

This volume contains the contributions to the Joint German/Austrian Con- rence on Arti?cial Intelligence, KI 2001, which comprises the 24th German and the 9th Austrian Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence. They are divided into the following categories: ¿ 2 contributions by invited speakers of the conference; ¿ 29 accepted technical papers, of which 5 where submitted as application papers and 24 as papers on foundations of AI; ¿ 4 contributions by participants of the industrial day, during which companies working in the ?eld presented their AI applications. After a long period of separate meetings, the German and Austrian Societies ¿ for Arti?cial Intelligence, KI and OGAI, decided to hold a joint conference in Vienna in 2001. The two societies had previously held one joint conference. This took place in Ottstein, a small town in Lower Austria, in 1986. At that time, the rise of expert system technology had also renewed interest in AI in general, with quite some expectations for future advances regarding the use of AI techniques in applications pervading many areas of our daily life. Since then ?fteen years have passed, and we may want to comment, at the beginning of a newcentury, on the progress that has been made in this direction.