The European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD) will be located in Antwerp, Belgium, from September 15th to 19th, 2008. This event builds upon a very successful series of 18 ECML and 11 PKDD conferences, which have been jointly organized for the past seven years. It has become the major European scientific event in these fields and in 2008 it will comprise presentations of contributed papers and invited speakers, a wide program of workshops and tutorials, a discovery challenge, a demo track and an industrial track.