The Fifth International Conference on Automatic Differentiation held from August 11 to 15 2008
in Bonn Germany is the most recent one in a series that began in Breckenridge USA in 1991
and continued in Santa Fe USA in 1996 Nice France in 2000 and Chicago USA in 2004. The
31 papers included in these proceedings re?ect the state of the art in automatic
differentiation (AD) with respect to theory applications and tool development. Overall 53
authors from institutions in 9 countries contributed demonstrating the worldwide acceptance of
AD technology in computational science. Recently it was shown that the problem underlying AD is
indeed NP-hard f- mally proving the inherently challenging nature of this technology. So most
likely no deterministic silver bullet polynomial algorithm can be devised that delivers
optimum performance for general codes. In this context the exploitation of doma- speci?c
structural information is a driving issue in advancing practical AD tool and algorithm
development. This trend is prominently re?ected in many of the pub- cations in this volume not
only in a better understanding of the interplay of AD and certain mathematical paradigms but
in particular in the use of hierarchical AD approaches that judiciously employ general AD
techniques in application-speci?c - gorithmic harnesses. In this context the understanding of
structures such as sparsity of derivatives or generalizations of this concept like scarcity
plays a critical role in particular for higher derivative computations.
