Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AI 2002, held in Canberra, Australia in December 2002. The 62 revised full papers and 12 posters presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 117 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on natural language and information retrieval, knowledge representation and reasoning, deduction, learning theory, agents, intelligent systems. Bayesian reasoning and classification, evolutionary algorithms, neural networks, reinforcement learning, constraints and scheduling, neural network applications, satisfiability reasoning, machine learning applications, fuzzy reasoning, and case-based reasoning.