The 18th Conference of IASC-ERS, COMPSTAT'2008,is held in Porto,P- tugal,fromAugust24thtoAugust29th2008,locallyorganisedbytheFaculty of Economics of the University of Porto. COMPSTAT is an initiative of the European Regional Section of the Int- national Association for Statistical Computing (IASC-ERS), a section of the International Statistical Institute (ISI). COMPSTAT conferences started in 1974 in Wien; previous editions of COMPSTAT were held in Berlin (2002), Prague (2004) and Rome (2006). It is one of the most prestigious world conferences in Computational Statistics, regularly attracting hundreds of - searchers and practitioners, and has gained a reputation as an ideal forum for presenting top qualitytheoretical and applied work,promoting interdis- plinary researchand establishing contacts amongstresearcherswith common interests. COMPSTAT'2008 is the ?rst edition of COMPSTAT to be hosted by a Portuguese institution. Keynote lectures are addressed by Peter Hall (Department of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne), Heikki Mannila (Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, University of Helsinki) and Timo Ter. asvirta (School of Economics and Management, University of Aarhus).
The conference program includes two tutorials: "Computational Methods in Finance"byJamesGentle(DepartmentofComputationalandDataSciences, George Mason University) and "Writing R Packages" by Friedrich Leisch (Institut fur .. Statistik, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universit. at). Each COMPSTAT meeting is organised with a number of topics highlighted, which lead to - vited Sessions. The Conference program includes also contributed sessions in di?erent topics (both oral communications and posters).