FSTTCS 2005: Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science

This year marks a milestone in the history of FST&TCS, which ?rst took place in 1981. We would like to take this opportunity to express our appreciation of the foresight and commitment to excellence shown by the early organizersof the conference. The conference is now organized by IARCS (Indian Association for Researchin Computing Science), and the conference has been the foundation on which the IARCS community has been built. To commemorate the Silver Jubilee of FST&TCS, we had an extra day to accommodate special sessions and a larger number of invited speakers. As in previousyears,wewerefortunatetohaveanumberofhighlyeminentresearchers giving plenary talks. It gives us great pleasure to thank Manindra Agrawal, Tom Henzinger, Russell Impagliazzo, Raimund Seidel, Natarajan Shankar, Joel Spencer and Igor Walukiewicz for agreeing to give talks and for contributing to this volume. This year'sconference attracted 167 submissions with authors from 29 co- tries. Except for some papers which were deemed to be out of scope by the ProgramCommittee (PC),eachsubmissionwasreviewedby atleastthreem- bers of the PC, with help from many external reviewers.With 466 reviews at hand, the PC deliberated for more than two weeks before ?nally selecting the 38 papers included in this volume. We thank all the reviewers for their inva- able help. The PC members put in a great deal of hard work to select the best papers from the submissions. We express our gratitude to all PC members for doing an excellent job. Special thanks are due to Kamal Lodaya for managing the conference software as well.