In the summer of 1956, John McCarthy organized the famous Dartmouth Conference which is now commonly viewed as the founding event for the field of Artificial Intelligence. During the last 50 years, AI has seen a tremendous development and is now a well-established scientific discipline all over the world. Also in Europe AI is in excellent shape, as witnessed by the large number of high quality papers in this publication. In comparison with ECAI 2004, there's a strong increase in the relative number of submissions from Distributed AI / Agents and Cognitive Modelling. Knowledge Representation & Reasoning is traditionally strong in Europe and remains the biggest area of ECAI-06. One reason the figures for Case-Based Reasoning are rather low is that much of the high quality work in this area has found its way into prestigious applications and is thus represented under the heading of PAIS.