Welcome to the ninth in a series of conferences that have brought together researchers in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and in Statistics to discuss problems of mutual interest. The exchange has broadened research in both fields and has strongly encouraged interdisciplinary work.

We are very pleased to report that we received a record number of submissions to the conference. After a rigorous review process we were able to accept 15% of the submissions for oral presentation and 27% for poster presentation. These presentations, together with an excellent set of invited talks by Andrew Blake, Bill Freeman, Zoubin Ghahramani, David Haussler, Geoffrey Hinton, Tommi Jaakkola and Lawrence Saul, have produced a conference whose technical quality is matched only by the quality of the extracurricular activities, such as snorkelling, scuba diving, waverunning, parasailing, fishing, sailing and golf. Congratulations to all of our contributors for making this an outstanding year for AI & Statistics!

Brendan Frey and Christopher Bishop
Conference Organizers