General and program chair welcome message

Summary form only given, as follows. CIFEr, Computational Intelligence for Financial Engineering and Economics is the major collaboration between the professional engineering and financial communities, and is one of the leading forums for new technologies and applications in the intersection of computational intelligence and financial engineering and economics. Intelligent computational systems have become indispensable in virtually all financial applications, from portfolio selection to proprietary trading to risk management. But nowhere in this definition does it explain the significant role that these three mediums, Computational Intelligence and Financial Engineering and Economics, play in the various financial communities and in our professional lives. CIFEr has been a means of exploration for us and many other professionals who work in a financial arena. We need leading edge Financial Engineers now more then ever to work with "a new" set of "basics" which have evolved recently. Our subprime/liquidity crisis and flash crashes has affected us globally. Program and Algorithmic Trading will continue to grow while changing the way Traders trade and Trade Support supports. The bar has been raised with Regulatory and Compliance and Risk Management. The new rules will not work with the old processes. We need to find new ways to working with the new tools we have developed with Computational Intelligence. We believe CIFEr is one of those forums that will help Financial Engineers get through some perplexing problems at this very difficult time.