Advances in Computer Science - ASIAN 2004, Higher Level Decision Making

The9thAsianComputingScienceConferencewasheldinChiangMaiinDec- ber 2004. This volume contains papers that were presented at that conference. The conference was dedicated to Jean-Louis Lassez, on the occasion of his ?fth cycle (60th year) birthday. Its theme was ¿higher-level decision-making¿. Philippe Flajolet was invited to give the opening keynote address, while Yuzuru Tanaka and Phillip Rogaway were also keynote speakers. In addition to the keynote speakers, distinguished colleagues of Jean-Louis Lassez were - vited to present talks in his honour. Many of those talks are represented by papers in this volume, but I would like to thank all those speakers: Jonathan Bernick Alex Brodsky Vijay Chandru T. Y. Chen Norman Foo Martin Golumbic Richard Helm Claude Kirchner H¿ el` ene Kirchner Kim Marriott Krishna Palem Kotagiri Ramamohanarao Vijay Saraswat Masahiko Sato R. K. Shyamasundar Nicolas Spyratos Andrew Sung Pascal Van Hentenryck Jean Vuillemin Following a call for papers, 75 papers were submitted, comprising 47 from Asia, 13 from Europe, 8 from Australia, 5 from North America, and 2 from the Middle East. Submissions came from a total of 23 countries. Korea, China and Thailand were the most-represented countries. These papers underwent ano- mous refereeing before the Program Committee selected 17 papers for presen- tion at the conference. I thank the Program Committee for doing an excellent job under severe time pressure. I thank the General Chairs of the conference, Joxan Ja?ar and Kanchana Kanchanasut, for their support.