Welcome to the twenty-third Midwest Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science Conference (MAICS2012). This is the fourth time that MAICS is held at the University of Cincinnati. In keeping with the tradition of the previous conferences, this year too, graduate students and junior researchers were encouraged to submit their work to be presented along with that of more senior researchers. We wish to thank the program committee for the thorough reviews that so many members of the committee supplied, including extended comments and suggestions for the authors. Given the diversity of topics in the papers submitted to the conference, the reviewers' tasks were quite challenging. This year's one and half day conference schedule is packed with thirty papers included in the program and the printed proceedings. Submissions were made from six countries despite that MAICS is usually advertised as a regional conference. We consider this as a global recognition of the conference quality and special appeal. We are thankful for active contribution and participation of students. About a half of accepted papers are primarily authored by students and, as a result of competitive review scores, the Program Committee nominated five student papers for the best student paper award sponsored by Cognitive Science Society. This year the conference features critical needs and trends as illustrated by the three invited plenary lecturers, Dr. Michelle Quirk, Dr. Traian Marius Truta and Dr. Kevin Gluck, who will present their ideas on Deterrence Analysis, K-Anonymity in Social Networking Services, and some recent development of Cognitive Models for the Air Force research respectively. The success of the conference depends on many people who contributed to it. Thanks are due to York F. Choo, who again did an excellent job in designing the conference web page and the front cover of the proceedings, and to many of our students, who helped in many ways. Finally, we thank our sponsors for their generosity on financial and human recourse contributions - CINCO Credit Union, Cognitive Science Society, College of Wooster, and the University of Cincinnati, School of Computing Sciences and Informatics. We hope for a good conference with lively and interesting discussions.