"How often we recall, with regret", wrote Mark Twain about editors, "that 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 Laborat' orio de Intelig encia Arti?cial e Ci encias da Computa, c" ao (LIACC). This annual me- ing of ILP practitioners and curious outsiders is intended to act as the premier forum for presenting the most recent and exciting work in the ?eld. Six invited talks-three from ?elds outside ILP, but nevertheless highly relevant to it- and 20 full presentations formed the nucleus of the conference. It is the full-length papersofthese20presentationsthatcomprisethebulkofthisvolume. Asisnow 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 P- lishers for the "Best Student Paper" award on behalf of the Machine Lea- ing journal; and Springer-Verlag for continuing to publish the proceedings of these conferences.

Donald Michie was an extraordinary character. In a scientific career that spanned nearly 65 years, he was the pioneer in several fields including computing, mouse embryology, transplantation biology, and machine intelligence. Tragically, he died in a car crash in 2007.
Here, Ashwin Srinivasan presents a varied collection of Michie's writings, from Colossus and computers to mouse genetics and politics. Srinivasan, a computer scientist and graduate student of Donald Michie, introduces each section and brings together an engaging collection of lively essays, revealing Michie's remarkable personality and painting a picture of his life and interests.