The International Symposium on Smart Graphics 2004 was held on May 23-25, 2004 in Ban?, Canada. It was the ?fth event in a series which originally started in 2000 as a AAAI Spring Symposium. In response to the overwhelming success of the 2000 symposium, its organizers decided to turn it into a self-contained event in 2001. With the support of IBM, the ?rst two InternationalSymposia on Smart Graphics were held at the T. J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, NY in 2001 and 2002. The 2003 symposium moved to the European Media Lab in Heidelberg to underline the international character of the Smart Graphics enterprise and its community. The 2004 symposium particularly emphasized the contribution of arts and design to the interdisciplinary ?eld of Smart Graphics andwasthereforeheldattheBan?CentreinAlberta,Canada,aninternationally recognized center of creative excellence. The core idea behind these symposia is to bring together researchers and practitioners from the ?eld of computer graphics, arti?cial intelligence, cog- tive psychology and the ?ne arts.
Each of these disciplines contributes to what we mean by the term "Smart Graphics": the intelligent process of creating - pressive and esthetic graphical presentations. While artists and designers have been creatingcommunicativegraphicsfor centuries,arti?cialintelligencefocuses on automating this process by means of the computer. While computer graphics providesthetoolsforcreatinggraphicalpresentationsinthe?rstplace,cognitive sciences contribute the rules and models of perception necessary for the design of e?ective graphics.