This book summarizes the works and new research results presented at the Eighth Joint Conference on Knowledge-Based Software Engineering 2008 (JCKBSE 2008), that took place in August 25–28, 2008 at the University of Piraeus in Piraeus, Greece. JCKBSE is a well established international biannual conference that focuses on applications of artificial intelligence in software engineering. The eighth JCKBSE Conference was organised by the Department of Informatics of the University of Piraeus and it was the first time that the conference took place in Greece. There were submissions from 15 countries.

This year, the majority of submissions originate from Japan (as usual for this conference) and the second place belongs to Greece. The submissions were reviewed rigorously by at least two reviewers per submission and finally 40 papers were accepted as full papers and 16 papers were accepted as short papers. The papers address many topics in the context of Knowledge-Based Software Engineering including new challenges that have arisen in this demanding area of research:

• Knowledge-based requirements engineering, domain analysis and modelling.

• Development processes for knowledge-based applications.

• Knowledge acquisition.

• Software tools assisting the development.

• Architectures for knowledge-based systems and shells including intelligent agents.

• Intelligent user interfaces and human-machine interaction.

• Development of multi-modal interfaces.

• Knowledge technologies for semantic web.

• Internet-based interactive applications.

• Knowledge engineering for process management and project management.

• Methodology and tools for knowledge discovery and data mining.

• Knowledge-based methods and tools for testing, verification and validation, maintenance and evolution.

• Decision support methods for software engineering and cognitive systems.

• Knowledge management for business processes, workflows and enterprise modelling.

• Program understanding, programming knowledge, modeling programs and programmers.

• Software engineering methods for Intelligent Tutoring Systems.

In JCKBSE 2008 we had two important Keynote Speakers, Professor Lakhmi Jain from the University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia and Professor Xindong Wu from the University of Vermont, U.S.A. who is also Visiting Chair Professor of Data Mining in the Department of Computing at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China. Summaries of their talks are included in this book.

In addition there was an invited special session on “Advances in software technologies and cognitive systems” which focused on presenting and discussing such issues from a Research and Development aspect. A summary of the goals of the special session and a paper presented in the special session are included in this book. Finally a tutorial took place on Hybrid Reasoning with Argumentation Schemes.

We would like to thank the authors of the submitted papers for keeping the quality of the conference at high levels. Moreover, we would like to thank the members of the Program Committee as well as the additional reviewers for having performed rigorous reviews of the submissions. For their help with organizational issues of JCKBSE 2008, we express our thanks to the local organizing co-chairs, Professor Dimitris Despotis and Associate Professor George Tsihrintzis, the publicity co-chairs Professor Nikolaos Alexandris and Professor Evangelos Fountas, as well as the local organizing committee members at the University of Piraeus. Thanks are due to Ari Sako of the University of Piraeus for having customized the software Open Conference Manager and for having developed many software modules that facilitated the submission of papers, reviewing process and registration of conference participants.

Maria Virvou and Taichi Nakamura

JCKBSE'08 conference co-chairs