The field of Semantic Computing addresses the derivation of semantic information from content and the connection of semantics to knowledge, where "content" may be anything including structured data, video, audio, text, hardware, software, process, etc. The Eighth IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC 2014) continues to foster the growth of a new research community. The conference builds on the success of the past ICSC conferences as an international forum for researchers and practitioners to present research that advances the state of the art and practice of Semantic Computing, as well as identifying emerging research topics and defining the future of the field. The event is located in Newport Beach, California at Hyatt Regency Newport Beach. The technical program of ICSC 2014 includes workshops, invited keynotes, paper presentations, panel discussions, industrial 'show and tells', demonstrations, and more. Submissions of high‐quality papers describing mature results or ongoing work are invited. The main goal of the conference is to foster the dialog between experts in each sub‐discipline. Therefore we especially encourage submissions of work that is interesting to multiple areas, such as multimodal approaches.