Opening Ceremony IJCAI 2009

Artificial intelligence continues to be one of the most vibrant, challenging, and forward-looking areas of computer science. These proceedings collect the papers accepted for presentation at the Twenty-first International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-09) held in Pasadena, California, USA from July 11–17, 2009. This collection represents some of the most exciting research taking place in AI today, continuing the tradition of excellence established by IJCAI at its inception 40 years ago in 1969. The theme of this year’s conference is "the interdisciplinary reach of artificial intelligence." Apart from its forward-looking nature, AI has always been outward-looking, and this theme allows us to explore the broad impact of AI on science, engineering, medicine, social sciences, arts and humanities through invited talks, workshops, tutorials, and other events dedicated to this theme. Many of the papers in this volume are explicitly interdisciplinary, and still more contribute to or draw from other intellectual disciplines indirectly.