Book excerpt: The purpose of the 8th Conference on Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence Research, Management and Applications (SERA 2010) held on May 24 – 26, 2010 in Montreal, Canada was to bring together scientists, engineers, computer users, and students to share their experiences and exchange new ideas and research results about all aspects (theory, applications and tools) of computer and information science, and to discuss the practical challenges encountered along the way and the solutions adopted to solve them. The conference organizers selected 15 outstanding papers from SERA 2010, all of which you will find in this volume of Springer’s Studies in Computational Intelligence.