Special Issue on Emerging Artificial Intelligence Applications and Innovations: Papers from AIAI 2006

Artificial Intelligence applications build on a rich and proven theoretical background to provide solutions to a wide range of real life problems. The ever expanding abundance of information and computing power enables researchers and users to tackle highly interesting issues for the first time, such as applications providing personalized access and interactivity to multimodal information based on user preferences and semantic concepts or human-machine interface systems utilizing information on the affective state of the user. This special issue comes after the successful organization of the 3rd IFIP Conference on Artificial Intelligence Applications & Innovations—AIAI 2006 (http://www.icsd.aegean.gr/aiai2006/), which was held from 7th till 9th of June 2006, in Athens, Greece. The general focus of the AIAI conferences and consequently the aim of this special issue is to provide insights on how AI can be implemented in real world applications. During the conference, papers describing advanced prototypes, systems, tools and techniques and general survey papers indicating future directions were presented. In this special issue we have tried to include extended in-depth analysis of the best work announced in the AIAI 2006 conference, presenting novel computational analysis techniques, methods, practices and systems, also taking into account the target