"Intelligent systems must perform in order to be in demand. " Intelligent systems technology is being applied steadily in solving many day-to-day problems. Each year the list of real-world deployed applications that inconspicuously host the results of research in the area grows considerably. These applications are having a significant impact in industrial operations, in financial circles, in transportation, in education, in medicine, in consumer products, in games and elsewhere. A set of selected papers presented at the seventeenth in the series of conferences on Industrial and Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems (IEA/AIE 2004), sponsored by the International Society of Applied Intelligence, is offered in this manuscript. These papers highlight novel applications of the technology and show how new research could lead to new and innovative applications. We hope that you find these papers to be educational, useful in your own research, and stimulating. In addition, we have introduced some special sessions to emphasize a few areas of artificial intelligence (AI) that are either relatively new, have received considerable attention recently or perhaps have not yet been represented well. To this end, we have included special sessions on e-learning, bioinformatics, and human-robot interaction (HRI) to complement the usual offerings in areas such as data mining, machine learning, intelligent systems, neural networks, genetic algorithms, autonomous agents, natural language processing, intelligent user interfaces, evolutionary computing, fuzzy logic, computer vision and image processing, reasoning, heuristic search, security, Internet applications, constraint satisfaction problems, design, and expert systems.