Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second Mexican International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, MICAI 2002, held in Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico in April 2002. The 56 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 85 submissions from 17 countries. The papers are organized in topical sections on robotics and computer vision, heuristic search and optimization, speech recognition and natural language processing, logic, neural networks, machine learning, multi-agent systems, uncertainty management, and AI tools and applications.