Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th Mexican International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, MICAI 2009, held in Guanajuato, Mexico, in November 2009. The 63 revised full papers presented together with one invited talk were carefully reviewed and selected from 215 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on logic and reasoning, ontologies, knowledge management and knowledge-based systems, uncertainty and probabilistic reasoning, natural language processing, data mining, machine learning, pattern recognition, computer vision and image processing, robotics, planning and scheduling, fuzzy logic, neural networks, intelligent tutoring systems, bioinformatics and medical applications, hybrid intelligent systems and evolutionary algorithms.