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  Preface

 The first Conference for PhD Students in Computer Science (CSCS) was organized by the Institute of Informatics of the József Attila University and held in Szeged, Hungary from July 18 to 22, 1998. The aim of the meeting was to provide a forum for PhD students for presenting their results which they achieved during their studies.

 The Program Committee was actually the Doctoral Committee of the Department: Miklós Bartha, Tibor Csendes, János Csirik, József Dombi, Zoltán Ésik, Zoltán Fülöp, Ferenc Gécseg, Balázs Imreh, Attila Kuba, Eörs Máté, and György Turán. The Organizing Committee consisted of László Bernátsky, Tibor Csendes, Csongor Halmai, László Martonossy, Lajos Schrettner, and Mariann Sebő.

 There were about 80 participants and 70 talks from 8 countries in many fields of computer science and its applications. Beyond the Hungarian PhD Schools in Informatics, mainly those foreign universities were represented (University of Turku and University of Nis) which have a strong cooperation with the József Attila University. The talks were going in two parallel sections in artificial intelligence, automata and formal languages, computer networks, database theory, discrete mathematics, fuzzy decision support systems, information systems, optimization, picture processing, and software engineering. The talks of the students were completed by 4 plenary talks of leading experts.

 Those students who gave a talk had the possibility to submit the paper version of their presentaion for publication in a special issue of Acta Cybernetica . Altogether 37 manuscripts were submitted, out of which 18 have been accepted, 18 were rejected and one is still under review. This special issue contains 14 of the accepted papers, while 2 papers already appeared in Volume 13 Number 4 (1998), and 2 further will be published in a later regular issue of Acta Cybernetica.

 The full program of the conference, the preliminary proceedings and further information can be found on the web page http://www.inf.u-szeged.hu/cscs.

 On the basis of our collected positive experiences, the conference will be organized regularly under similar conditions hopefully with more foreign participation. The next meeting will be held also in Szeged, Hungary, in July 2000.

 Tibor Csendes Zoltán Fülöp Chairman of CSCSManaging Editor