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.