This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence, EPIA '97, held in Coimbra, Portugal, in October 1997. The volume presents 24 revised full papers and 9 revised posters selected from 74 submissions from various countries. Also included are two full invited papers and two abstracts of invited talks. The papers are organized in topical sections on automated reasoning and theorem proving; CBR and machine learning; constraints; intelligent tutoring; knowledge representation; multi-agent systems and DAI; nonmonotonic, qualitative and temporal reasoning, and problem solving.