This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th Brazilian Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, SBIA 2002, held in Porto de Galinhas/Recife, Brazil in November 2002. The 39 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 146 submissions from 18 countries. the papers are organized in topical sections on theoretical and logical methods, autonomous agents and multi-agent systems, machine learning, knowledge discovery and data mining, evolutionary computation and artificial life, uncertainty, and natural language processing.