This journal publishes both applications- and theory-oriented articles on new developments in the fields of pattern recognition and artificial intelligence, and is of interest to both researchers in industry and academia. From the beginning, there has always been a close relationship between the disciplines of pattern recognition and artificial intelligence. The recognition and understanding of sensory data like speech or images, which are major concerns in pattern recognition, have always been considered as important subfields of artificial intelligence. On the other hand, topics like knowledge representation, inference, search or learning that belong to the center of artificial intelligence, have constantly attracted the attention of researchers working in pattern recognition. IJPRAI is the first to cover both fields in one periodical, and particular emphasis is put on papers which are in the intersection of both fields. However, it is open to articles from "pure" pattern recognition and "pure" artificial intelligence as well.