WSC2008Chair's Welcome Message Dear Colleague, The World Soft Computing (WSC) conference is an annual international online conference on applied and theoretical soft computing technology. This WSC 2008 is the thirteenth conference in this series and it has been a great success. We received a lot of excellent paper submissions which were peer-reviewed by an international team of experts. Only60 papers out of111 submissions were selected for online publication. This assured a high quality standard for this online conference. The corresponding online statistics are a proof of the great world-wide interest in the WSC 2008 conference. The conference website had a total of33,367di?erent human user accessesfrom43 countries with around100 visitors every day,151 people signed up to WSC to discuss their scienti?c disciplines in our chat rooms and the forum. Also audio and slide presentations allowed a detailed discussion of the papers. The submissions and discussions showed that there is a wide range of soft computing applications to date. The topics covered by the conference range from applied to theoretical aspects of fuzzy, neuro-fuzzy and rough sets over to neural networks to single and multi-objective optimisation. Contributions aboutparticleswarmoptimisation,geneexpressionprogramming,clustering, classi?cation,supportvectormachines,quantumevolutionandagentsystems have also been received. One whole session was devoted to soft computing techniques in computer graphics, imaging, vision and signal processing.