Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the scientific track of the 7th Congress of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence, AI*IA 2001, held in Bari, Italy, in September 2001. The 25 revised long papers and 16 revised short papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the volume. The papers are organized in topical sections on machine learning; automated reasoning; knowledge representation; multi-agent systems; natural language processing; perception, vision, and robotics; and planning and scheduling.