Author Description

The proceedings of ECML/PKDD2003 are published in two volumes: the P- ceedings of the 14th European Conference on Machine Learning (LNAI 2837) and the Proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (LNAI 2838). The two conferences were held on September 22–26, 2003 in Cavtat, a small tourist town in the vicinity of Dubrovnik, Croatia. As machine learning and knowledge discovery are two highly related?elds, theco-locationofbothconferencesisbene?cialforbothresearchcommunities.In Cavtat, ECML and PKDD were co-located for the third time in a row, following the successful co-location of the two European conferences in Freiburg (2001) and Helsinki (2002). The co-location of ECML2003 and PKDD2003 resulted in a joint program for the two conferences, including paper presentations, invited talks, tutorials, and workshops. Out of 332 submitted papers, 40 were accepted for publication in the ECML2003proceedings,and40wereacceptedforpublicationinthePKDD2003 proceedings. All the submitted papers were reviewed by three referees. In ad- tion to submitted papers, the conference program consisted of four invited talks, four tutorials, seven workshops, two tutorials combined with a workshop, and a discovery challenge.