The Arti?cial Intelligence and Cognitive Science Conference has taken place annually since 1988. It provides a forum for the exchange of ideas and the p- sentation of results relating to work conducted both in Ireland and worldwide. The conference spans a large number of ?elds including case-based reas- ing, cognitive modeling, constraint processing, data mining, evolutionary c- putation, intelligent agents, intelligent information retrieval, knowledge rep- sentation and reasoning, learning, natural language processing, neural networks, perception and planning, robotics, and scheduling. AICS 2002 was the thirteenth conference in the series and took place at U- versityofLimerickon12-13September.Inadditiontothe16regularpapersand 17 concise papers accepted for presentation, we were delighted to welcome two prestigious keynote speakers both ?tting in with the conference theme 'Towards Bio-inspired Computing'. They were David Goldberg of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Dario Floreano of the Swiss Federal Institute of Te- nology.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank our sponsors QAD Ireland and University of Limerick, as well as all those who were involved in the organisation of the conference including the Co-chairs, Programme Committee members, and Conference Administrators. June 2002 Richard F. E. Sutcli?e Organisation AICS 2002 was organized by the Department of Computer Science and Inf- mation Systems, University of Limerick, in association with the Arti?cial Int- ligence Association of Ireland.