Book excerpt: The papers in this volume are the refereed papers presented at AI-2011, the Thirty-first SGAI International Conference on Innovative Techniques and Applications of Artificial Intelligence, held in Cambridge in December 2011 in both the technical and the application streams. They present new and innovative developments and applications, divided into technical stream sections on Planning, Evolutionary Algorithms, Speech and Vision, and Machine Learning, followed by application stream sections on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Machine Learning, Evolutionary Algorithms and AI in Action. The volume also includes the text of short papers presented as posters at the conference. This is the twenty-eighth volume in the Research and Development in Intelligent Systems series, which also incorporates the nineteenth volume in the Applications and Innovations in Intelligent Systems series. These series are essential reading for those who wish to keep up to date with developments in this important field.