The 9th Ibero-American conference on Arti?cial Intelligence IBERAMIA 2004 took place in Mexico for the third time in 16 years, since the ?rst conference organized in Barcelona in January 1988. It was also the second time that the conference was held in the state of Puebla. The ?rst time, in 1996, it was the UniversidaddelaAm' ericasPueblathatwasinchargeofthelocalorganizationof the conference, this year it was the turn of the Instituto Nacional de Astrof' ?sica, ' Optica y Electr' onica, INAOE, to do it. The 1996 conference was the last conference where all the papers were p- sentedinSpanishorPortuguese.Sincethentheproceedingshavebeenpublished in English by Springer in the LNAI series. This linguistic change was a sign of the scienti?c maturity of the Ibero-American arti?cial intelligence community and the best way for it to share with the international arti?cial intelligence c- munity the best results of many of its research groups. It was also the way to open this forum to researchers of other countries to enrich the scienti?c content of the conferences.
One relevant feature of the last four conferences with the proceedings p- lished in English by Springer is that, besides the participation of people from many countries, the majority of papers came from Ibero-American researchers.