ThePacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining(PAKDD) has been held every year since 1997. This year, the eighth in the series (PAKDD 2004) was held at Carlton Crest Hotel, Sydney, Australia, 26–28 May 2004. PAKDD is a leading international conference in the area of data mining. It p- vides an international forum for researchers and industry practitioners to share their new ideas, original research results and practical development experiences from all KDD-related areas including data mining, data warehousing, machine learning, databases, statistics, knowledge acquisition and automatic scientific discovery, data visualization, causal induction, and knowledge-based systems. The selection process this year was extremely competitive. We received 238 research papers from 23 countries, which is the highest in the history of PAKDD, and reffects the recognition of and interest in this conference. Each submitted research paper was reviewed by three members of the program committee. F- lowing this independent review, there were discussions among the reviewers, and when necessary, additional reviews from other experts were requested. A total of 50 papers were selected as full papers (21%), and another 31 were selected as short papers (13%), yielding a combined acceptance rate of approximately 34%. The conference accommodated both research papers presenting original - vestigation results and industrial papers reporting real data mining applications and system development experience. The conferenceal so included three tutorials on key technologies of knowledge discovery and data mining, and one workshop focusing on specific new challenges and emerging issues of knowledge discovery and datamining. The PAKDD 2004 program was further enhanced with keynote speeches by two outstanding researchers inthe area of knowledge discovery and data mining: Philip Yu, Manager of Software Tools and Techniques, IBM T.J.