In this year of the first centenary of Alan Turing's birth, the Fifteenth International Conference of the Catalan Association of Artificial Intelligence (CCIA 2012) took place on October 24–26, 2012 at the Universitat d'Alacant (Spain). Alan Turing made a unique impact on the history of computer science, artificial intelligence, developmental biology and the mathematical theory of computability during his relatively brief life. In its own short life since 1994, the Catalan Association of Artificial Intelligence (ACIA) has, as a member of the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI), fostered cooperation between researchers in Artificial intelligence within the Catalan-speaking community. One of the instruments that ACIA has used for this purpose has been the yearly organization of CCIA, an international conference where not only researchers from Catalan-speaking countries, but also from other countries in Europe and worldwide, have found a place to show, discuss and publish the results of their researches and developments.

In its fifteenth edition, CCIA 2012 received 27 original contributions that were carefully reviewed by three members of a steering committee. Of these 27 submissions, 23 were accepted for inclusion in this book for their relevance to CCIA 2012, originality, technical validity, and relevance of the conclusions. Despite the fact that the majority of papers were from Catalonia and Spain, CCIA also attracted submissions from Colombia, France, Italy, Mexico, The Netherlands and Venezuela.

Submissions correspond to the topics of KDD, DM and machine learning; natural language processing and recommenders; computer vision; robotics; AI for optimization problems, and AI applications in the real world.

CCIA 2012 also hosted two invited keynote speakers: Oscar Cordón and Eduardo Nebot.

Oscar Cordón has been professor at the Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence of the University of Granada since 1995, and is a member of the Soft Computing and Intelligent Information Systems research group at this university. He was the head of the Virtual Learning Centre of the University of Granada (CEVUG) between 2001 and 2005. He has published more than 50 international journal papers, advised on nine PhD dissertations, participated in 15 research projects and contracts supported by the European Commission, the Spanish Government, the Andalusian Government, the University of Granada and Puleva Food S.A. (being the main researcher in five of them). He is co-editor of five special issues in different international journals and three books, and co-author of the book Genetic Fuzzy Systems: Evolutionary Tuning and Learning of Fuzzy Knowledge Bases. He also created, and since 2004 has chaired, the Genetic Fuzzy Systems Task Force in the Fuzzy Systems Technical Committee (IEEE Computational Intelligence Society) and is Area Editor of the International Journal of Approximate Reasoning and has been treasurer of the EUSFLAT Society since 2005. His current main research interests are in the fields of: fuzzy rule-based systems, genetic fuzzy systems, soft computing for forensic anthropology and medical imaging, evolutionary algorithms, ant colony optimization and other metaheuristics, and their applications to different topics (information retrieval, bioinformatics, etc.).

Eduardo Nebot is the Executive Director of the Australian Centre for Field Robotics, at the University of Sydney, Australia. This centre numbers more than 70 researchers in four core areas: sensors, fusion & perception, actuators, control & decision, modelling, learning & adaptation, and architectures, systems & cooperation. These four core research areas define the science of field robotics and intelligent systems and represent the main focus of the ACFR. Eduardo's main research interest is the field of robotics, focusing on the automation of open cast mining. He is the author of more than 100 journal and conference papers and has several patents in the area described above. His talk at the conference was about a variety of research in the area of open cast mining, involving intelligent vehicles, computer vision, pattern recognition, sensors, etc.

We would like to express our sincere gratitude to all the authors and members of the scientific and organizing committees who have made this conference a success. Our special thanks also go to the plenary speakers, Óscar Cordón and Eduardo Nebot for their efforts in preparing very interesting lectures, and to the president of the ACIA, Vicenç Torra, for his kind support.

Alacant, October 2012

David Riaño, Universitat Rovira i Virgili

Eva Onaindia, Universitat Politècnica de València

Miguel Cazorla, Universitat d'Alacant