Thecentralchallengeoftheoreticalcomputerscienceistodeploymathematicsin waysthatservethecreationofusefulalgorithms. Inrecentyearstherehasbeena growinginterest in the two-dimensionalframework of parameterizedcomplexity, where, in addition to the overall input size, one also considers a parameter,with a focus on how these two dimensions interact in problem complexity. This book presents the proceedings of the 1st InternationalWorkshopon - rameterized and Exact Computation (IWPEC 2004,http://www. iwpec. org), which took place in Bergen, Norway, on September 14-16, 2004. The workshop was organized as part of ALGO 2004. There were seven previous workshops on the theory and applications of parameterized complexity. The ?rst was - ganized at the Institute for the Mathematical Sciences in Chennai, India, in September, 2000. The second was held at Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, in July, 2001. In December, 2002, a workshop on parameterized complexity was held in conjunction with the FST-TCS meeting in Kanpur, India. A second Dagstuhl workshop on parameterized complexity was held in July, 2003.
Another wo- shoponthesubjectwasheldinOttawa,Canada,inAugust,2003,inconjunction with the WADS 2003 meeting. There have also been two Barbados workshops on applications of parameterized complexity. In response to the IWPEC 2004 call for papers, 47 papers were submitted, and from these the programcommittee selected 25 for presentation at the wo- shop. Inaddition,invitedlectureswereacceptedbythedistinguishedresearchers Michael Langston and Gerhard Woeginger.