2008 Preface -- IARCS Annual Conference on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science

This volume contains the proceedings of the 28th international conference on the Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science (FSTTCS 2008), organized under the auspices of the Indian Association for Research in Computing Science (IARCS). This year's conference attracted 117 submissions. Each submission was reviewed by at least three independent referees. The final selection of the papers making up the programme was done through an electronic discussion on EasyChair, spanning two weeks, without a physical meeting of the Programme Committee (PC). All PC members participated actively in the discussion. We have five invited speakers this year: Hubert Comon-Lundh, Uriel Feige, Erich Graedel, Simon Peyton Jones and Leslie Valiant. We thank them for having readily accepted our invitation to talk at the conference and for providing abstracts (and even full papers) for the proceedings. We thank all the reviewers and PC members, without whose dedicated effort the conference would not be possible. We thank the Organizing Committee for making the arrangements for the conference. This year, the conference is being held at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, as part of its centenary year celebrations. It is a great honour and privilege for the conference to be recognized and associated with the institute on this occasion. Finally, this year we have taken a decisive step in democratizing the conference by moving away from commercial publishers. Instead, we will be hosting the proceedings online, electronically, via the Dagstuhl Research Online Publication Server (DROPS). A complete copy of the proceedings will also be hosted on the FSTTCS website (www.fsttcs.org). The copyrights to the papers will reside not with the publishers but with the respective authors. The copyright is now governed by the Creative Commons attribution NC-ND. We do hope this direction will be sustained in the future.