The 12th Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AI'QQ) held in Sydney, Australia, 6-10 December 1999, is the latest in a series of annual re gional meetings at which advances in artificial intelligence are reported. This series now attracts many international papers, and indeed the constitution of the program committee reflects this geographical diversity. Besides the usual tutorials and workshops, this year the conference included a companion sympo sium at which papers on industrial appUcations were presented. The symposium papers have been published in a separate volume edited by Eric Tsui. Ar99 is organized by the University of New South Wales, and sponsored by the Aus tralian Computer Society, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Computer Sciences Corporation, the KRRU group at Griffith University, the Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute, and Neuron- Works Ltd. Ar99 received over 120 conference paper submissions, of which about o- third were from outside Australia. Prom these, 39 were accepted for regular presentation, and a further 15 for poster display. These proceedings contain the full regular papers and extended summaries of the poster papers. All papers were refereed, mostly by two or three reviewers selected by members of the program committee, and a list of these reviewers appears later. The technical program comprised two days of workshops and tutorials, fol lowed by three days of conference and symposium plenary and paper sessions."

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, PRICAI '96, held in Cairns, Queensland, Australia in August 1996.
The 56 revised full papers included in the book were carefully selected for presentation at the conference from a total of 175 submissions. The topics covered are machine learning, interactive systems, knowledge representation, reasoning about change, neural nets and uncertainty, natural language, constraint satisfaction and optimization, qualitative reasoning, automated deduction, nonmonotonic reasoning, intelligent agents, planning, and pattern recognition.