The 18th Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AI 2005) was held at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), Sydney, Australia from 5 to 9 December 2005. AI 2005 attracted a historical record number of submissions, a total of 535 papers. The review process was extremely selective. Out of these 535 submissions, the Program Chairs selected only 77 (14.4%) full papers and 119 (22.2%) short papers based on the review reports, making an acceptance rate of 36.6% in total. Authors of the accepted papers came from over 20 countries. This volume of the proceedings contains the abstracts of three keynote speeches and all the full and short papers. The full papers were categorized into three broad sections, namely: AI foundations and technologies, computational intelligence, and AI in specialized domains. AI 2005 also hosted several tutorials and workshops, providing an interacting mode for specialists and scholars from Australia and other countries. Ronald R. Yager, Geoff Webb and David Goldberg (in conjunction with ACAL05) were the distinguished researchers invited to give presentations. Their contributions to AI 2005 are really appreciated.