The meeting here commented is the second in the series of LIPS - Logic, Informatics and Philosophy of Science - workshops organized by CLIPS and its partners. The first was held in 1997 to commemorate the centenary of Emil Post's birth.

Which dates in the history of logic should we distinguish as relevant to the research on intelligent systems? Though living intelligent systems existed for milions of years, just the recent emergence of engineered intelligent systems, as predicted by Turing on purely logical grounds, could launch out a research to deal with the both in the most general way.

This project fits into the LIS (Learning and Intelligent Systems) initiative which is meant - as stated in the NSF document - "for advancing in fundamental ways our understanding of learning and intelligent behavior in living and engineered systems", and " seeks to stimulate multidisciplinary research that will unify experimentally and theoretically derived concepts related to learning and intelligent systems, and that will promote the use and development of information technologies in learning and discovery across a wide variety of fields."

The historical and multidisciplinary approach, as proposed in our workshops, should essentially contribute to the said theoretical unifying of concepts related to learning and intelligent systems, both living and engineered, on the logical basis that involves the following ideas and results:

• those concerning solvability, closely related to the definition of intelligence as the problem-solving ability;
• those concerning automated deduction; these are relevant to AI as much of its acivity consists in producing systems which carry out efficient inferences.

The former are due to the host of great logicians as Gödel, Tarski Turing, Post, Church, von Neumann, et al, while the latter belong to a current flourishing research in logic (for some examples see "Mathesis Universalis", No. 2 and No. 3).