this book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th brazilian symposium on artificial intelligence, sbia 2004, held in sao luis, maranhao, brazil in september/october 2004. the 54 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 208 submissions from 21 countries. the papers are organized in topical sections on logics, planning, and theoretical methods; search, reasoning, and uncertainty; knowledge representation and ontologies; natural language processing; machine learning, knowledge discovery and data mining; evolutionary computing, artificial life, and hybrid systems; robotics and compiler vision; and autonomous agents and multi-agent systems.