Since the first AI Conference took place in Sydney in 1987, the series of annual Australasian Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence has become the premier event for Artificial Intelligence researchers in Australasia and one of the major international forums on AI worldwide. In 2008 the AI conference was hosted in New Zealand for the first time, in Auckland. In 2013, the 26th Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence returns to New Zealand, and will be held in Dunedin. It will be hosted by the University of Otago, New Zealand’s oldest university, top-ranked for research quality. The conference will host two distinguished keynote speakers: Fangzhen Lin, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Pascal Van Hentenryck, Professor at the University of Melbourne. AI 2013 will be co-located with the 16th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems (PRIMA 2013).