This book constitutes the proceedings of the 16th Russian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, RCAI 2018, Moscow, Russia, in September 2018.  The 22 full papers presented along with 4 short papers in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 75 submissions. The conference deals with a wide range of topics, including data mining and knowledge discovery, text mining, reasoning, decision making, natural language processing, vision, intelligent robotics, multi-agent systems, machine learning, ontology engineering.