This volume contains papers and abstracts presented at the First Symposium on Cellular Automata “Journées Automates Cellulaires” (JAC 2008). This year's conference was held on 21-25 April 2008 at the Hôtel du Général d'Entraigues, in the scenic old city of Uzès, France.

The Symposium on Cellular Automata “Journées Automates Cellulaires” (JAC 2008) is an international conference centered on cellular automata and other models of computation. Topic of interest included: cellular automata, tilings, computation models, logic and other bistroodles.

The call for papers led to approximately 25 submissions from 7 countries. Each was assigned to at least two program committee members, refereed directly by them or treated by external referees. The program committee selected 14 regular and 5 exploratory papers. As chair of this committee, I would like to sincerely thank its members and the external referees for the valuable work they haveinvested in the reviewing process. In the name of both the program committee and the organizing committee, I would like to thank authors of selected papers: they chose JAC, a new conference, to submit very good papers that could have been also accepted at top notch and well established conferences with a wide scope.

During the four days of the conference 14 regular papers and 5 exploratory papers were presented. Indeed, the PC committee of JAC 2008 has created a special category for exploratory papers: we considered in this category papers dealing with very special new variants of cellular automata, papers that are scope borderline, or papers that present interesting works for the conference audience but are yet in preliminary state.

In addition to these presentations, 5 informal talks were also given. The extended abstracts of the invited talks, the regular and exploratory papers and the abstracts of the informal talks are included in these proceedings.

It was a pleasure and an honor to have the opportunity to organize this first Symposium on Cellular Automata “Journées Automates Cellulaires” (JAC 2008). The conference benefited from six invited speakers, whose topics spanned the above list, and a total of 50 registered attendees. I would like to express my thanks to the six invited speakers, Jacques Mazoyer, Gianpiero Cattaneo, Eric Goles, Jarkko Kari, Maurice Nivat and Alexander Shen.

I wish to particularly thank the sponsors for the meeting: Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale de Marseille, Escape research group of the Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale de Marseille, Laboratoire de l'Informatique du Parallélisme, IXXI Rhône-Alpes Complex Systems Institute and Université de Provence.

Special thanks are due to A. Voronkov for his EasyChair software (http://www.easychair. org/) which gives the organizers of conferences a remarkable level of comfort. The conference could not be organized without the help of the members of the Organizing Committee, chaired by Grégory Lafitte and Nicolas Ollinger. I wish to express in these lines my deepest gratitude for the harsh work done mainly in a vacation period and for their tenacity.

These proceedings are published in an electronic format and in a printed version with ISBN 978-5-94057-377-7. The electronic proceedings are available through several portals, and in particular through HAL. HAL is an electronic repository managed by several French research agencies. We want to thank HAL for hosting the proceedings of JAC and guaranteeing them perennial availability. The rights on the articles in the proceedings are kept with the authors and the papers are available freely, under a Creative Commons license.

Bruno Durand