Preface

This volume contains the proceedings of the 23nd International Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AIxIA 2024), the primary scientific event of the Associazione Italiana per l’Intelligenza Artificiale (AIxIA). AIxIA is a non-profit organization, dedicated to promoting the advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) within academic, social, and production contexts. The association established the series of international conferences in 1991, initially organizing an event every two years, and then maintaining an annual schedule from 2015 onwards. Over the years, the conference has visited many cities throughout the national territory, as reported in the LNCS proceedings of the various editions.

AIxIA 2024 was held in Bolzano, Italy, during November 25-28, hosted by the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. The conference received 41 submissions for the regular research papers track. Each paper was peerly reviewed by at least three members of the Program Committee, and finally 24 papers were accepted for publication in these proceedings and presented at the conference. Besides regular papers, the conference also received the submission of 21 discussion papers, i.e., position papers or extended abstracts of articles recently published in première international conferences and journals related to AI. After a dedicated review process, 15 discussion papers were accepted for presentation at the conference.

AIxIA 2024 featured three renowned keynote speakers: “Representation learning for acting and planning" by Hector Geffner (RWTH Aachen University); “Against the clock: lessons learned by applying temporal planning in practice" by Andrea Micheli (Fondazione Bruno Kessler, FBK, Trento); and “The language factor" by Malvina Nissin (University of Groningen). The conference agenda also included two tutorials: “Designing Virtual Knowledge Graphs" by Davide Lanti and Diego Calvanese (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano); and “Learning and Reasoning in Neuro-Symbolic Systems" by Luciano Serafini (Fondazione Bruno Kessler, FBK, Trento).

Besides the main track, AIxIA 2024 encompassed a wide range of theoretical and applied AI aspects, with 22 co-located workshops dedicated to specific topics, bringing together AI communities with related interests. In addition, the following collateral events have been organized: a Doctoral Consortium, award events, and a public panel focused on the impact of generative AI and Large Language Models.

We express our gratitude to the various institutions and sponsors who supported AIxIA 2024, the AIxIA Executive Board for its steadfast assistance, the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, for granting us the opportunity to host the conference in its facilities. We also want to thank all authors for submitting high-quality reearch papers, the members of the Program Committee and the additional reviewers for their efforts to produce fair and thorough evaluations of the submitted papers. Our heartfelt thanks also go to the Workshop and Tutorial chairs, Antonella Guzzo (University of Calabria) and Oliver Kutz (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano), and the Doctoral Consortium chairs, Davide Bacciu (University of Pisa) and Ivan Donadello (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano), for their invaluable contributions in shaping an exciting program for AIxIA 2024. We would also like to thank the Proceedings Chair, Sergio Tessaris (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano), for his assistance in gathering the papers and organizing the final version of this volume. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to all those who, in various capacities, contributed to the success of AIxIA 2024.  

October 2024

Gabriella Cortellessa
Alessandro Artale
Marco Montali