This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th Congress of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence, AI*IA 2003, held in Pisa, Italy in September 2003.

The 44 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 91 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on knowledge representation and reasoning, soft computing, machine learning, data mining, intelligent agents, planning, robotics, natural language processing, and applications in various fields.

This volume constitutes the combined proceedings of the 4th International Workshops on Logic Program Synthesis and Transformation (LOPSTR '94) and on Meta-Programming
(META '94), held jointly in Pisa, Italy in June 1994.
This book includes thoroughly revised versions of the best papers presented at both workshops. The main topics addressed by the META papers are language extensions in support of meta-logic, semantics of meta-logic, implementation of meta-logic features, performance of meta-logic, and several applicational aspects. The LOPSTR papers are devoted to unfolding/folding, partial deduction, proofs as programs, inductive logic programming, automated program verification, specification and programming methodologies.

Investigating meta-programming within the logic programming paradigm, Meta-Logics and Logic Programming presents original research on an important extension of logic programming that makes it more amenable for knowledge representation and programming in general. The 12 contributions, many written especially for this book, explore the foundations, language design issues, and applications of meta-programming in logic programming.Meta-programming -- the process of writing computer programs that can manipulate representations of other programs -- has been key both in the foundations of computer science and in its practical developments. Examples of meta-programs include compilers, interpreters, program analyzers, and partial evaluators. The choice of logic programming as a basis for meta-programming offers several practical and theoretical advantages: among them, the possibility of tackling critical foundational problems of meta-programming within a strong theoretical framework, and the surprising ease of programming. The usual framework of logic programming (and more generally first-order logic), however, has to be modified and extended to formally deal with meta-programs, extensions the editors call "meta-logics." Along with an exploration of meta-programming in logic programming, the definitions, formal properties, and use of these extensions constitute one of the book's main themes.The first part of the book, Foundations, focuses on the representation problem -- how object programs are represented within meta-programs. The second part, Language Support for Meta-Logics, is concerned with language extensions that make meta-programming easier and more elegant. The third part, Meta-Logics for Knowledge Management, deals with the use of meta-logic for advanced knowledge representation purposes.