This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 19th Brazilian Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, SBIA 2008, held in Salvador, Brazil, in October 2008.The 27 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited lectures and 3 tutorials were carefully reviewed and selected from 142 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on computer vision and pattern recognition, distributed AI: autonomous agents, multi-agent systems and game knowledge representation and reasoning, machine learning and data mining, natural language processing, and robotics.