The International Symposium on Parameterized and Exact Computation (IPEC, formerly IWPEC) is an international symposium series that covers research in all aspects of parameterized and exact algorithms and complexity. Started in 2004 as a biennial workshop, it became an annual event from 2008.

The four previous meetings of the IPEC/IWPEC series were held in Bergen, Norway (2004), Z¨urich, Switzerland (2006), Victoria, Canada (2008) and Copenhagen, Denmark (2009). On recommendations of the Steering Committee, from this year, the word ‘symposium’ replaces the word ‘workshop’ in the name, and it gets a new abbreviation IPEC (rhyming with the old one IWPEC).

IPEC 2010 was the fifth symposium in the series, held in Chennai, India, during December 13-15, 2010. The symposium was co-located with the 30th Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science conference (FSTTCS 2010), a premier theory conference in India.

At IPEC 2010, we had three plenary speakers: Anuj Dawar (University of Cambridge, UK), Fedor V. Fomin (University of Bergen, Norway) and Toby Walsh (NICTA and University of New South Wales, Australia). The abstracts accompanying their talks are included in these proceedings.We thank the speakers for accepting our invitation and for their abstracts.

In response to the call for papers, 32 papers were submitted. Each submission was reviewed by at least four reviewers. The reviewers were either Program Committee members or invited external reviewers. The Program Committee held electronic meetings using the EasyChair system, went through extensive discussions, and selected 19 of the submissions for presentation at the symposium and inclusion in this LNCS volume.

From this year IPEC also started the tradition of awarding excellent student paper awards. This year the award was shared by two papers, “Small Vertex CoverMakes Petri Net Coverability and Boundedness Easier” by M. Praveen and “Inclusion/Exclusion Branching for Partial Dominating Set and Set Splitting” by Jesper Nederlof and Johan M. M. van Rooij. We thank Frances Rosamond for sponsoring the award.

We are very grateful to the Program Committee, and the external reviewers they called on, for the hard work and expertise which they brought to the  difficult selection process. We also wish to thank all the authors who submittedtheir work for our consideration. Special thanks go to Meena Mahajan and her team for the local organization of IPEC 2010.We thank, in particular, Neeldhara Misra and Geevarghese Philip for help in maintaining the website of IPEC 2010.