This book constitutes the proceedings of the 40th SGAI International Conference on Innovative Techniques and Applications of Artificial Intelligence, AI 2020, which was supposed to be held in Cambridge, UK, in December 2020. The conference was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic.The 23 full papers and 9 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 44 submissions. The volume includes technical papers presenting new and innovative developments in the field as well as application papers presenting innovative applications of AI techniques in a number of subject domains. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: neural nets and knowledge management; machine learning; industrial applications; advances in applied AI; and medical and legal applications.