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From February 19-23 of this year, the 8th International Abstract State Machines Workshop took place in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria on the Canary Islands (Spain), organized by us as part of Eurocast 2001. The intensive three-days program consisted of 24 contributed papers and three invited lectures, by Yuri Gurevich ("Abstract State Machines: Theory and Applications"), Joseph Sifakis ("Some Trends in Modeling Real-Time Systems"), and Egon Börger ("Design for Reuse via Structuring Techniques for ASMs"). See the extended abstracts in "Formal Methods and Tools for Computer Science" (Ed. R. Moreno-Diaz and A. Quesada-Arencibia, IUCTC Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, ISBN 84-699-3971-8) and the revised text of Börger's lecture in Proc. EUROCAST'2001 (Ed. R. Moreno-Diaz and A. Quesada-Arencibia), Springer LNCS 2178 (2001). We thank the members of the program committee of the workshop who helped us to attract and review the papers which have been submitted for presentation at the workshop: R. Gotzhein (University of Kaiserslautern), S. Graf (IMAG, Grenoble), Y. Gurevich (Microsoft Research, Redmond), P. Paeppinghaus (Siemens AG, Munich), A. Slissenko (University of Paris 12), J. Teich (University of Paderborn), L. Thiele (ETH Zürich), W. Zimmermann (University of Halle). As announced in the Call for Participation, after the workshop a reviewing process was started to select the best papers which appear here as an ASM issue of J.UCS the third one of its kind, see J.UCS 3.4 (April 1997) and J.UCS 3.5 (May 1997). We thank the following colleagues who acted as reviewers: