Advances in artificial intelligence

The Mexican International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (MICAI), a yearly international conference series organized by the Mexican Society for Artificial Intel- gence (SMIA), is a major international AI forum and the main event in the academic life of the country’s growing AI community. In 2008 Mexico celebrates the 50th an- versary of development of computer science in the country: in 1958 the first computer was installed at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Nowadays, computer science is the country’s fastest growing research area. The proceedings of the previous MICAI events were published by Springer in its Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) series, vol. 1793, 2313, 2972, 3789, 4293, and 4827. Since its foundation in 2000, the conference has been growing in popularity, and improving in quality. This volume contains the papers presented at the oral session of the 7th Mexican International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, MICAI 2008, held October 27–31, 2008, in Atizapán de Zaragoza, Mexico. The conference received for evaluation 363 submissions by 1,032 authors from 43 countries (see Tables 1 and 2). This volume contains revised versions of 94 papers by 308 authors from 28 countries selected - cording to the results of an international reviewing process. Thus the acceptance rate was 25.9%. The book is structured into 20 thematic fields representative of the main current areas of interest for the AI community, plus a section of invited papers: