I am delighted to have the honour to introduce the Proceedings of the Nineteenth European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-2010), including the proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems (PAIS-2010).

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a central topic in contemporary computer science and informatics. The fruits of fifty years of AI research have benefited application domains as disparate as industrial systems control and medicine. The milestone events in AI research are increasingly regarded as milestones in human scientific and technological development: from the first chess playing program to defeat a reigning world champion under standard chess tournament rules, to the first robot to autonomously traverse 150 miles of rough terrain. Techniques, results, and concepts developed under the banner of AI research have proved to be of fundamental importance in areas such as economics, philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and logical analysis. And of course, AI remains a topic of perennial fascination in popular culture.

Initiated in 1974, the biennial European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI) is Europe's premier archival venue for presenting scientific results in AI. Organised by the European Coordinating Committee for AI (ECCAI), the ECAI conference provides an opportunity for researchers to present and hear about the very best research in contemporary AI. As well as a full programme of technical papers, ECAI-2010 features the Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems conference (PAIS), the Starting AI Researcher Symposium (STAIRS), and an extensive programme of workshops, tutorials, and invited speakers.

Some 607 papers were submitted to ECAI-2010, with the largest areas of submission being Knowledge Representation & Reasoning, Multi-Agent Systems, and Machine Learning. After review by the international programme committee, 135 full papers were accepted for presentation, with further papers being accepted as short papers/posters. Overall, the acceptance rate for full papers was approximately 22%.

Acknowledgments: Many thanks to Gerd Brewka for his continual encouragement and sound advice. Dave Shield at Liverpool maintained the web submission site, and without his support, my life would have been much, much, much more difficult over the past six months.

Michael Wooldridge, University of Liverpool, UK, June 2010