Message from the SEAMS 2013 chairs

The 8th International Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems (SEAMS´13) was held in San Francisco during May 20-21 2013, in conjunction with the 35th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE´13). SEAMS is the leading international forum for presenting and discussing novel ideas, innovations, trends and experiences in engineering software with self-managing and self-adaptation features. These key features enable software systems to adapt at run-time so they can cope with uncertainty. This uncertainty may be due to changes in their operational environment, variability of resources, new user needs, intrusions, and faults. In addition to the keynotes, the program includes six research paper sessions showcasing ground-breaking research on the emerging discipline of adaptive software systems. The 19 accepted papers were selected from 68 submissions (for a 28% acceptance rate). Each paper was carefully reviewed by at least three programme committee members. The symposium programme covers the following topics: Evaluation, Services, Learning and updates, Case studies and decision-making, Qualities, and Evolution. For the first time for SEAMS symposia, research submissions were classified by their authors into one of four categories: formal and/or technical, evaluation, experience or exploratory. These categories are intended to guide authors to better define the nature of the contribution of their work, but also to circumscribe reviewer expectations. For instance, a technical paper is expected to be strong on originality, but not necessarily so on evaluation, while for an evaluation paper the importance of originality vs. evaluation is reversed.