total of 21 area chairs represe- ing di?erent communities within the ?eld of AI selected further members of the program committee and helped the local organizers to acquire papers. The new approach appealed to the AI community: we had 126 submissions, which cons- tuted an increase of more than 50%, and which resulted in 14 parallel sessions on the following topics agents and intelligent virtual environments AI and engineering automated reasoning cognition evolutionary computation Robotics experience and knowledge management history and philosophical foundations knowledge representation and reasoning machine learning and mining natural language processing planning and scheduling spatial and temporal reasoning vision and perception o?ering cutting edge presentations and discussions with leading experts. Thirty-one percent of the contributions came from outside German-speaking countries.