This volume contains 18 papers that were presented at the Eighth Asian C- puting Science Conference (ASIAN 2003) in Mumbai in December 2003. The theme of the conference this year was programming languages and distributed computation. Papers were invited on all aspects of theory, practice and appli- tions related to this theme. The Program Committee invited Greg Morrisett to give the keynote talk (in a joint session with the International Conference on Logic Programming). Andrew Birrell and Mark S. Miller were also invited to give talks. The Program Committee selected 16 papers out of the 53 submitted. Together, these papers were authored by 48 people from 11 countries. I thank the Program Committee for doing an outstanding job under severe timepressure,andtheExecutiveCommitteeforinvitingmetochairtheProgram Committee. I also thank the sponsoring institutions for this conference: Asian Institute of Technology Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique United Nations University/International Institute for Software Technology National University of Singapore Waseda University Tata Institute of Fundamental Research The Pennsylvania State University IBM TJ Watson Research Lab Mountain Lakes, NJ Vijay Saraswat September 2003 Organization ASIAN 2003 was organized under the auspicies of the Executive Committee.