Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases European Conference, Antwerp, Belgium, September 15-19, 2008, Proceedings

When in 1986 Yves Kodrato? started the European Working Session on Le- ning at Orsay, France, it could not be foreseen that the conference would grow year by year and become the premier European conference of the ?eld, attr- ting submissions from all over the world. The ?rst European Conference on Principles of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery was organized by Henryk Jan Komorowskiand Jan Zytkowin 1997 in Trondheim, Norway. Since 2001the two conferences have been collocated, o?ering participants from both areas the opportunity to listen to each other's talks. This year, the integration has moved even further. Instead of ?rst splitting the ?eld according to ECML or PKDD topics, we ?attened the structure of the ?eld to a single set of topics. For each of the topics, experts were invited to the Program Committee. Submitted papers were gathered into one collection and characterized according to their topics. The reviewers were then asked to bid on all papers, regardlessof the conference. This allowed us to allocate papers more precisely. The hierarchical reviewing process as introduced in 2005 was continued. We nominated30AreaChairs,eachsupervisingthereviewsanddiscussionsofabout 17 papers. In addition, 307 reviewers completed the ProgramCommittee. Many thanks to all of them! It was a considerable e?ort for the reviewers to carefully review the papers, some providing us with additional reviews even at short - tice.