GCAI 2019: Editor's Preface

This volume contains the papers presented at GCAI 2019: the 5th Global Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held on 17-19 September 2019.  The conference was held on the main site of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano in Bolzano, Italy, as part of the Bolzano Rules and Artificial INtelligence Summit (BRAIN 2019).

The GCAI 2019 program committee consisted of 29 experts from around the world. The program committee chairs were Diego Calvanese (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano) and Luca Iocchi (Sapienza University of Rome).  Each of the 21 submissions to GCAI 2019 was reviewed by at least 2 reviewers, and 13 full papers and 1 short paper were selected for inclusion in the proceedings and to be presented at the conference.

The conference featured the following invited talks, which were shared among the various events that were part of BRAIN 2019:
- Giuseppe De Giacomo (Sapienza University of Rome): WhiteMech: White-Box Self-Programming Mechanisms;
- Marlon Dumas (University of Tartu): Artificial Intelligence for Business Process Management: Status, Challenges, and Perspectives;
- Mike Gualtieri (Forrester Research): The Future of Enterprise AI and Digital Decisions;
- Marie-Laure Mugnier (University of Montpellier): Existential Rules: a Study Through Chase Termination, FO-Rewritability and Boundedness.

As part of BRAIN, GCAI 2019 received generous sponsorship by the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, by the Transregional Collaborative Research Centre 248 "Foundations of Perspicuous Software Systems" (funded by the DFG), by Robert Bosch GmbH, by the Artificial Intelligence Journal, by Hotel Greif, and by Ontopic.  The conference has been organized by Diego Calvanese as General Chair, supported by a team at the KRDB Research Centre for Knowledge and Data at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano that includes Evellin Cardoso, Julien Corman, Paolo Felli, Ana Ozaki, Rafael Penaloza, Livia Predoiu, Andrey Rivkin, Nicolas Troquard, and Guohui Xiao.  The submission, program committee work, and proceedings editing were done using EasyChair. The proceedings of GCAI 2019 are published in the EasyChair EPiC Series in Computing.

GCAI 2019 is the fifth LRG (Linking Research Globally) conference.  LRG's mission is to bring together researchers worldwide to discuss advances in science, engineering, and technology.  It aims at organizing conferences all over the world, where researchers from different countries and backgrounds can meet. The LRG Steering Committee consists of:

Nikolaj Bjorner (Microsoft Research, USA)
Adel Bouhoula (University of Carthage, Tunisia)
Laura Kovács (Chalmers University, Sweden)
Sriram Rajamani (Microsoft Research, India)
Geoff Sutcliffe (University of Miami, USA)
Andrei Voronkov (University of Manchester, UK)