FSE

It is my distinct pleasure to also welcome you to the Eighteenth ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE-18). We have assembled a highquality technical program that I hope will leave many of you inspired to build upon the results presented to further the state-of-the-art in our field.

This year, FSE received 170 submissions, one of which was withdrawn by the authors shortly before the reviewing period commenced. Each of the remaining papers was reviewed by three members of the program committee, with a subset of 74 papers discussed in detail at the program committee meeting that was held in Cape Town, South Africa, after ICSE 2010. Through one-anda- half days of careful deliberations, 34 papers were selected for presentation at the conference and publication in the conference proceedings. Unfortunately, one of these papers was later found to exhibit self-plagiarism, as a result of which the program consists of 33 high-quality papers for an acceptance rate of 20%.

I am particularly excited about the breadth of topics covered by the submissions and, indeed, the papers that were ultimately selected for inclusion in the conference. The conference has sessions on distributed systems, concurrency, code similarities, empirical studies of systems, empirical studies of people, verification, replay, web services, testing, dependencies, and analysis, as well as one miscellaneous session that groups papers on combined hardware and software instrumentation to classify program executions, synthesis of life behavior models, and locating need-to-translate constant strings in web applications. This breadth is representative of the diverse interests of our community, and shows how FSE serves as a home for all of this work.

I deeply appreciate the many hours that each of the members of the volunteer program committee spent reading the submissions, providing detailed feedback in the reviews, discussing the papers at the program committee meeting, and dealing with various other aspects concerning the program. It was particularly heartening to witness a very positive program committee meeting, with a desire to admit papers rather than to reject them. On a number of papers, this attitude made a difference, and the program only benefitted.