The interest in STACS has remained at a high level over the past years. The STACS 2008 call for papers led to approximately 200 submissions from 38 countries. Each was assigned to at least three program committee members. The program committee held a 2-week long electronic meeting at the end of November, to select 54 papers. As co-chairs of this committee, we would like to sincerely thank its members and the many external referees for the valuable work they put into the reviewing process. The overall very high quality of the papers that were submitted to the conference made this selection a difficult task.
We would like to express our thanks to the three invited speakers, Maxime Crochemore, Thomas Schwentick and Mihalis Yannakakis, for their contributions to the proceedings.
Special thanks are due to A. Voronkov for his EasyChair software (www.easychair.org) which gives the organisers of conferences such as STACS a remarkable level of comfort; to Ralf Klasing for helping us explore the many possibilities of this brilliant software; to Emilka Bojanczyk for the design of the STACS poster, proceedings and logo; and to the members of the Organizing Committee, chaired by David Janin.
An innovation in this year's STACS is the electronic format of the publication. A printed version was also available at the conference, with ISBN 978-3-939897-06-4. The electronic proceedings are available through several portals, and in particular through HAL and DROPS. HAL is an electronic repository managed by several French research agencies, and DROPS is the Dagstuhl Research Online Publication Server. We want to thank both these servers for hosting the proceedings of STACS and guaranteeing them perennial availability. The rights on the articles in the proceedings are kept with the authors and the papers are available freely, under a Creative Commons license (see www.stacs-conf.org/faq.html for more details).
The site of STACS 2008: stacs08.labri.fr
The site of the STACS conferences: stacs-conf.org