The 32nd Annual German Conference on Artificial Intelligence, KI 2009, took place at the University of Paderborn, Germany, from September 15–18, 2009, continuing a long-standing tradition of successful events. Initially a national meeting in 1975, the conference has evolved to attract researchers and developers from academia and industry worldwide, showcasing research across all aspects of artificial intelligence. This year, submissions came from 23 countries across 4 continents. Emphasizing international participation, the conference sought to encompass various branches of AI. A total of 21 area chairs, representing different AI communities, played a crucial role in selecting program committee members and acquiring papers. This new approach resonated with the AI community, leading to 126 submissions—a more than 50% increase—resulting in 14 parallel sessions covering topics such as agents and intelligent virtual environments, AI and engineering, automated reasoning, cognition, evolutionary computation, robotics, experience and knowledge management, history and philosophical foundations, knowledge representation and reasoning, machine learning and mining, natural language processing, planning and scheduling, spatial and temporal reasoning, and vision and perception. Notably, 31% of contributions originated from outside German-speaking countries.
