The 19th edition of the International Conference of the Catalan Association for Artificial Intelligence was held in Barcelona and hosted by the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, from the 19th to the 21st of October 2016 and was organized by the AI groups of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA-CSIC) and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC-BarcelonaTech). From the first edition of the conference in 1998 held in Tarragona, until today, it has been a long way. The main goal was to create a forum that allows communication and research collaboration among the Catalan AI community. This objective has been achieved and at the same time has widened over the last 19 years. CCIA, the conference organized by the Catalan Association for Artificial Intelligence (ACIA), is currently an international event for researchers in the Catalan Countries which also involves researchers from other countries around the world.

CCIA 2016 received 50 original contributions that were carefully reviewed by two members of the program committee. Of these 50 submissions, 16 were accepted as long papers (10 pages) and 22 were accepted as short papers (6 pages). These 38 submissions were accepted for inclusion in this book for their relevance, originality and technical validity. In the current edition the majority of Catalan scientific institutions are represented by the participation of 142 authors, from the following institutions: Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Universitat de Vic (UVIC), Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC-BarcelonaTech), Universitat Rovira Virgili (URV), Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), Universitat de Barcelona (UB), Universitat de Girona (UdG), Universitat Ramon Llull (URL), Universitat de Lleida (UdL), Hospital Universitari Sant Joan de Reus, Eurecat – Centre Tecnològic de Catalunya, Institut d'Investigació Sanitària Pere Virgili, Institut d'Investigació Biomèdica de Girona Dr. Josep Trueta, Centre Mèdic Teknon – Quirón. We are very pleased to have also the participation of authors from the rest of Spain (10), Colombia (3), France (2), Germany (1), India (2), Iran (5), Italy (1), Mexico (1), Netherlands (1), Norway (1), Poland (1), Romania (2) and the United States (3).

In this conference we prefer single track presentations instead of parallel sessions, with the goal of promoting discussions among the conference attendees. Sixteen of the accepted papers were selected for oral presentations and 22 for short oral presentations followed by posters in the posters sessions. The conference program also featured invited talks by three outstanding researchers: Emilia Gómez (Associate Professor (Serra-Húnter and ICREA Fellow) at the Department of Information and Communication Technologies, Universitat Pompeu Fabra), Petia Radeva (Head of the Computer Vision Group at the University of Barcelona and Head of the Medical Imaging Laboratory at the Computer Vision Center) and Jordi Nin (Senior data scientist at BBVA D&A).

We would like to express our sincere gratitude to the authors of the contributed papers, to the invited speakers for their enlightening talks, to all members of the scientific and organizing committees who worked hard to make this conference a success, to Eva Armengol, former scientific programme chair in CCIA'2015, for her help during this last year and to Beatriz López, president of ACIA, for her kind support.

Financial support was generously provided by BigML and Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC-BarcelonaTech).

We are confident that this book is a good example of the quality of the research that is currently being carried out within the Catalan AI community.

Barcelona, October 2016

Àngela Nebot, Scientific Programme Chair, UPC-BarcelonaTech

Xavier Binefa, Local Arrangement Chair, UPF

Ramon López de Mántaras, General Chair, IIIA-CSIC