This volume contains the texts of papers presented at the Second Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, held at Dublin City University in September 1989. This Conference has now become the major annual forum in Ireland for the presentation and discussion of current research work in the multi-disciplinary area of Artificial Intelligence. Papers in this volume have been divided into seven sections which vary in their subject matter. Image processing, human-computer interaction, planning, applications and theory of expert systems, learn­ ing, speech, and natural language processing and semantics repre­ sents as broad a spectrum of AI and AI-related topics as can be found in current AI research. This harmonises quite well with the aims and scope of the AICS'89 conference which were to provide a forum for industry and academic research to discuss AI and AI-related topics and we were delighted that such a broad coverage of topics was achieved. Despite the broad nature, however, none of the papers are primarily review articles; each paper presents new research results within its own specific area.