This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 44 th German Conference on Artificial Intelligence, KI 2021, held in September/October 2021. Due to COVID-19 pandemic the conference was held virtually. The 16 full and 4 short papers with one extended abstract were carefully reviewed and selected from 59 submissions. As well-established annual conference series KI is dedicated to research on theory and applications across all methods and topic areas of AI research.