This symposium is dedicated to the understanding and characterization of workloads that run on all types of computing systems. New applications and programming paradigms continue to emerge rapidly as the diversity and performance of computers increase. On one hand, improvements in computing technology are usually based on a solid understanding and analysis of existing workloads. On the other hand, computing workloads evolve and change with advances in microarchitecture, compilers, programming languages, and networking communication technologies. Whether they are smart phones and deeply embedded systems at the low end or massively parallel systems at the high end, the design of future computing machines can be significantly improved if we understand the characteristics of the workloads that are expected to run on them. This symposium, sponsored by IEEE Computer Society and the Technical Committee on Computer Architecture, will focus on characterizing and understanding emerging applications in consumer, commercial and scientific computing.