Inductive Logic Programming: 14th International Conference, ILP 2004, Porto, Portugal, September 6-8, 2004 : 9783540229414

Napoleon once shot at a magazine editor and missed him and killed a publisher. But we remember with charity, that his intentions were good.” Fortunately, we live in more forgiving times, and are openly able to express our pleasure at being the editors of this volume containing the papers selected for presentation at the 14th International Conference on Inductive Logic Programming.

ILP 2004 was held in Porto from the 6th to the 8th of September, under the auspices of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computing of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP), and the Laboratório de Inteligência Artificial e Ciências da Computação (LIACC). This annual meeting of ILP practitioners and curious outsiders is intended to act as the premier forum for presenting the most recent and exciting work in the field. Six invited  talks—three from fields outside ILP, but nevertheless highly relevant to it— and20 full presentations formed the nucleus of the conference. It is the full-length papers of these 20 presentations that comprise the bulk of this volume. As is now common with the ILP conference, presentations made to a “Work-in-Progress” track will, hopefully, be available elsewhere.

We gratefully acknowledge the continued support of Kluwer Academic Publishers for the “Best Student Paper” award on behalf of the Machine Learning journal; and Springer-Verlag for continuing to publish the proceedings of these conferences. The Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Fundação Luso- Americana para o Desenvolvimento, Fundação Oriente, Departamento de Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores, and KDNet, the European Knowledge Discovery Network of Excellence have all been extremely generous, and we are thankful. Special mention too must be made of João Correia Lopes, who orchestrated the electronic components of the conference most beautifully.