The Catalan Association of Artificial Intelligence (ACIA, http://www.acia.org) was founded in September 1994 as a non-profit association for the development and dissemination of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Catalan society. ACIA's main goal is to support communication between the persons and organizations involved in AI as well as to promote social, cultural, scientific, economic and governmental awareness of AI. Today, ACIA is the backbone of the Catalan AI community, which is quite active at both a local and international level and from the academic to the corporate sector. ACIA is a member of the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI).

The first meetings of ACIA were created in 1995 with the aim of becoming the forum of the Catalan AI community. The first meetings were local and informal, but soon the association held their meetings in the form of Conferences. In 1998 the first International Conference of the Catalan Association for Artificial Intelligence (the CCIA), took place in Tarragona, with an open approach to the international community. From then onwards, every year the CCIA has been organized in all the Catalan lands, including many cities in Catalonia, but also in the Balearic Islands and Valencian provinces, in Spain, and main cities in foreign countries retaining the Catalan culture, like Perpignan, in Catalunya-Nord (Southern France), Andorra or l'Alghero in Sardegna (Italy).

The CCIA'2013 is the 16th edition of the conference and it is held in the city of Vic, placed in the geographical center of Catalonia, with an ancient Iberian origin (Fourth Century BC), a roman settlement dating back to the Third Century BC, and playing a central role in Catalan history from the middle ages to the Eighteenth Century. This edition of the conference is organized by the Digital Technologies Group of Universitat the Vic, with the help of the Knowledge Engineering and Machine Learning Group (KEMLG) of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya-BarcelonaTech and the Grup de Tecnologia Informàtica i Intel.ligència Artificial (GTI-IA) of the Computer Systems and Computation Department of the Universitat Politècnica de València.

The CCIA is today consolidated as the annual meeting point of the Catalan AI community, which can be seen as a strong community, with a lot of scientific activity and a good level of internationalization. Most of the institutions in the Catalan territory support the conference by participating in the scientific committee or by submitting contributions. The number of submissions and the wide range of AI topics addressed reflects the good health of this community. A 17.5 authors sharing authorship in the contributed papers reflect the internationalization of the Catalan AI community. Also, a non-neglectable number of researchers formed in the Catalan AI community are now developing their scientific activities in international research centers and some of them have been supporting CCIA as invited speakers in past editions.

In this edition, we are very honored to have been supported by a Scientific Committee, including members from all the Catalan, Balearic and Valencian universities, both public and private, from the main AI research institutes in Catalonia, the Basque Country, Southern France and international members from Australia, Austria, Germany, France, Italy, Romania, Switzerland and Venezuela.

As was said before, it is a great pleasure to realize that most of the members of the community participate in the conference by sending their contributions. In the current edition, CCIA'2013 received 50 original contributions from Catalonia (involving 100 authors), Valencia (7 authors), the rest of Spain (5), Belgium (1), Canada (1), Germany (2), Italy (2), Jamaica (1), Mexico (2), Ukraine (1), United Kingdom (4), United States (1). Submitted contributions were carefully reviewed by two or three members of the Scientific Committee. Because in CCIA single track is preferred over parallel sessions, the 26 papers with the best evaluation for their relevance to CCIA topics, originality, technical validity, relevance of conclusions, and for their potential to raise interesting discussions, were accepted as regular full papers; 5 were accepted as short papers with oral presentation and 12 as posters.

The papers have been organized around different topics, with a good coverage of the different AI branches and specializations, from more theoretical to more applied issues and from more cognitive to more perceptive approaches, which shows the good health of AI in the Catalan community. Topics include Relational Learning; Planning, Satisfiability and Constraints; Perception and Image Processing; Preprocessing; Patterns extraction in general (including Data Mining, Modelling, Learning, Soft-Computing and hybrid approaches); Post-processing, Model Interpretability and Decision Support; Recommenders, Similarity and CBR; and Multiagent Systems. The sessions of the conference are organized according to these topics, as are the sections of this book.

Accordingly, the two invited speakers for CCIA'2013 cover different aspects of AI. Carme Torras, from the Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial, CSIC-UPC, will speak about the advances of AI in robotics. Vladimir Estivill, from Griffith University, Australia, will talk about model-driven development by integrating planning and reasoning. From the local research institute (IRI) with international projection, to a foreign researcher linked to a Catalan university (UPF); from the most perceptive to the most cognitive AI approach, we hope that this CCIA provides a rich and fruitful forum for discussion, updating, networking and continues to strengthen the quality of the Catalan AI community and its related researchers.

We would like to express our gratitude to all the authors who supported this edition of CCIA by sending their contributions, to all members of the scientific and organizing committees who worked hard to make this conference a success. Special thanks to the invited speakers Carme Torras and Vladimir Estivill, for bringing interesting lectures to the conference, and to Vicenç Torra, president of ACIA, for his kind support and involvement.

Vic, Catalunya, October 2013

Karina Gibert, Chair of Scientific Committee, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya

Vicent Botti, General Chair, Universitat Politècnica de València

Ramon Reig-Bolaño, Local Organizing Committee Chair, Universitat de Vic