SCSS 2013: Editor's Preface

Symbolic Computation is the science of computing with symbolic objects (terms, formulae, programs, representations of algebraic objects etc.). Powerful symbolic algorithms have been developed during the past decades like theorem proving, automated reasoning, software verification, model checking, rewriting, formalization of mathematics, network security, Groebner bases, characteristic sets, telescoping for recurrence relations, etc.

The purpose of the International Symposium on Symbolic Computation in Software Science - SCSS is to promote research on theoretical and practical aspects of symbolic computation in software sciences. The symposium provides a forum for active dialog between researchers from several fields of computer algebra, algebraic geometry, algorithmic combinatorics, computational logic, and software analysis and verification.

This year's SCSS edition is the fifth in the SCSS workshop series and is organized at the Research Institute for Symbolic Computation (RISC) of the Johannes Kepler University Linz. With the focus of promoting the exchange of ideas and experiences from applications of symbolic computation in software science, SCSS 2013 has attracted researchers from across a number of fields, including computer algebra, algebraic geometry, term rewriting, process algebras, and program verification.

We are very excited to have three excellent keynote speakers: Bruno Buchberger (RISC-Linz), Wei Li (Beihang University) and Joel Ouaknine (Oxford University). Our invited speakers have significant research expertise and insights into the challenges and opportunities for the growing SCSS community.

We would like to thank the program committee members and reviewers for all their efforts. Thanks also go to the steering committee members for their valuable advice and guidance. We would also like to thank Andrei Voronkov for his help on EasyChair. Finally, we also acknowledge partial funding from the strategical program Innovative Upper Austria 2010 Plus and the Doctoral Program ``Computational Mathematics" (W1214) - DK1 project.