Inductive logic programming

1 “Change is inevitable.” Embracing this quote we have tried to carefully exp- iment with the format of this conference, the 15th International Conference on Inductive Logic Programming, hopefully making it even better than it already was. But it will be up to you, the inquisitive reader of this book, to judge our success. The major changes comprised broadening the scope of the conference to include more diverse forms of non-propositional learning, to once again have tutorials on exciting new areas, and, for the ? rst time, to also have a discovery challenge as a platform for collaborative work. This year the conference was co-located with ICML 2005, the 22nd Inter- tional Conference on Machine Learning, and also in close proximity to IJCAI 2005, the 19th International Joint Conference on Arti? cial Intelligence. - location can be tricky, but we greatly bene? ted from the local support provided by Codrina Lauth, Michael May, and others. We were also able to invite all ILP and ICML participants to shared events including a poster session, an invited talk, and a tutorial about the exciting new area of “statistical relational lea- ing”. Two more invited talks were exclusively given to ILP participants and were presented as a kind of stock-taking—? ttingly so for the 15th event in a series—but also tried to provide a recipe for future endeavours.