National Institute of Informatics (NII) Shonan workshops aspires to be an Asian “answer” to Dagstuhl. It has started just a couple of years ago and already attracted a number of interesting meetings with a large number of participants from Asia and other parts of the world. Shonan is situated in Kanagawa Prefec- ture, not far from Tokyo, and is easily reachable by train from Tokyo’s Narita International Airport. The participants stay in an excellent hotel with a research wing of the Shonan Village Center dedicated the NII Shonan workshops and may have group photos with Mount Fuji in the background.Workshop 2013-018 was organised by Gregory Gutin, Kazuo Iwama, and Dimitrios M. Thilikos. Briefly, the workshop’s motivation was as follows. In the parameterized/multivariate framework, NP-hardness is just the beginning: a result about the null-parameterization. What follows is a rich dialogue between theory and practice, with the goals of:• explaining the effectiveness of established heuristics and• designing better heuristics in mathematically disciplined ways.The workshop brought together researchers from both universities and indus- try, who were interested in exploring how a multivariate view of complexity anal- ysis and algorithm design can lead to industrially useful algorithms in new, math- ematically systematic ways.