The Eighth International Workshop on Planning and Scheduling for Space (IWPSS 2013) was held on March 25–26 2013 at the NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California. This was the eighth in a regular series that started in 1997.

Language, vision, and music: What common cognitive patterns underlie our competence in these disparate modes of thought? Language (natural and formal), vision, and music seem to share at best the following attributes: a hierarchical organization of constituents, recursivity, metaphor, the possibility of self-reference, ambiguity, and systematicity. Can we propose the existence of a general symbol system with instantiations in these three modes, or is the only commonality to be found at the level of such entities as cerebral columnar automata?

The Eighth International Workshop on Qualitative Reasoning about Physical Systems (QR '94) was held on 7-10 June 1994 in Nara, Japan. Fifty-three people participated, and 34 papers were presented in either oral or poster sessions. The papers either addressed core issues of qualitative reasoning or extended the field along three axes: (1) cognitive modeling, (2) mathematical sophistication, and (3) application. Mita's self-maintenance copier and IBM's mechanism design and analysis using configuration spaces were demonstrated, convincing the participants of the promising role of qualitative-reasoning techniques in engineering and manufacturing domains.