The first SWAT took place in 1988, in Halmstad, Sweden.[4] The first WADS was organised one year later, in 1989, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.[5] Until 2007, WADS was known as the Workshop on Algorithms and Data Structures,[1] and until 2008, SWAT was known as the Scandinavian Workshop on Algorithm Theory.[6]
Chazelle, Bernard; et al. (1996), "Application Challenges to Computational Geometry: CG Impact Task Force Report", in Chazelle, Bernard; Goodman, Jacob E.; Pollack, Richard (eds.), Advances in Discrete and Computational Geometry: Proceedings of the 1996 AMS-IMS-SIAM Joint Summer Research Conference, Discrete and Computational Geometry–Ten Years Later, July 14–18, 1996, Mount Holyoke College, American Mathematical Soc., ISBN978-0-8218-0674-6. Also available as a Princeton University technical report TR-521-96. Section 13.2 mentions the following conferences (in this order) as examples of "major algorithms conferences" with "a large amount of geometry": SODA, ISAAC, ESA, WADS, SWAT.
Navarro, Gonzalo; Raffinot, Mathieu (2002), Flexible Pattern Matching in Strings, Cambridge University Press, ISBN978-0-521-81307-5. Section 7.3.2 mentions the following conferences (in this order) as examples of conferences that publish articles on pattern matching (in addition to more narrow conferences CPM, COCOON, RECOMB, SPIRE, ISMB): DCC, ESA, FOCS, FSTTCS, ICALP, ISAAC, MFCS, SODA, STACS, STOC, SWAT, WAE, WADS.