Computation Cooperation And Life

Gheorghe Păun has played an important role within a wide range of disciplines, from the foundations of traditional computation theory and formal language theory to research gaining its inspiration from living nature. He has significantly contributed to the development of these diverse fields, initiating and pioneering some of them with remarkable imaginativeness and enthusiasm. Gheorghe Păun’s research focusses on systems inspired by structures and processes found in living systems, with the field of membrane computing or P systems being the most important of his initiatives. This Festschrift volume, published to honor Gheorghe Păun on the occasion of his 60th birthday, includes 16 contributions by his students and collaborators. The research presented aims to gain a better understanding of what computation is, to find better models of computation, and to look for new computing devices inspired by the structure and/or functioning of natural or societal systems. The papers are preceded by an introduction by Solomon Marcus, Gheorghe Păun’s lifelong teacher and mentor, and are organized in topical sections on general computing, grammar systems, membrane systems, and inspirations from natural computing.

Gheorghe Păun has played an important role within a wide range of disciplines, from the foundations of traditional computation theory and formal language theory to research gaining its inspiration from living nature. He has significantly contributed to the development of these diverse fields, initiating and pioneering some of them with remarkable imaginativeness and enthusiasm. Gheorghe Păun’s research focusses on systems inspired by structures and processes found in living systems, with the field of membrane computing or P systems being the most important of his initiatives. This Festschrift volume, published to honor Gheorghe Păun on the occasion of his 60th birthday, includes 16 contributions by his students and collaborators. The research presented aims to gain a better understanding of what computation is, to find better models of computation, and to look for new computing devices inspired by the structure and/or functioning of natural or societal systems. The papers are preceded by an introduction by Solomon Marcus, Gheorghe Păun’s lifelong teacher and mentor, and are organized in topical sections on general computing, grammar systems, membrane systems, and inspirations from natural computing.

This two-volume set constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th CCF Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, ChineseCSCW 2022 held in Datong, China, during September 23–25, 2022. The 60 full papers and 30 short papers included in this two-volume set were carefully reviewed and selected from 211 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: answer set programming; Social Media and Online Communities, Collaborative Mechanisms, Models, Approaches, Algorithms and Systems; Crowd Intelligence and Crowd Cooperative Computing; Cooperative Evolutionary Computation and Human-like Intelligent Collaboration; Domain-Specific Collaborative Applications.

In the world of information technology, it is no longer the computer in the classical sense where the majority of IT applications is executed; computing is everywhere. More than 20 billion processors have already been fabricated and the majority of them can be assumed to still be operational. At the same time, virtually every PC worldwide is connected via the Internet. This combination of traditional and embedded computing creates an artifact of a complexity, heterogeneity, and volatility unmanageable by classical means. Each of our technical artifacts with a built-in processor can be seen as a ''Thing that Thinks", a term introduced by MIT's Thinglab. It can be expected that in the near future these billions of Things that Think will become an ''Internet of Things", a term originating from ETH Zurich. This means that we will be constantly surrounded by a virtual "organism" of Things that Think. This organism needs novel, adequate design, evolution, and management means which is also one of the core challenges addressed by the recent German priority research program on Organic Computing.

Grid and cooperative computing has emerged as a new frontier of information tech- logy. It aims to share and coordinate distributed and heterogeneous network resources forbetterperformanceandfunctionalitythatcanotherwisenotbeachieved.Thisvolume contains the papers presented at the 2nd International Workshop on Grid and Coope- tive Computing, GCC 2003, which was held in Shanghai, P.R. China, during December 7–10, 2003. GCC is designed to serve as a forum to present current and future work as well as to exchange research ideas among researchers, developers, practitioners, and usersinGridcomputing,Webservicesandcooperativecomputing,includingtheoryand applications. For this workshop, we received over 550 paper submissions from 22 countries and regions. All the papers were peer-reviewed in depth and qualitatively graded on their relevance, originality, signi?cance, presentation, and the overall appropriateness of their acceptance. Any concerns raised were discussed by the program committee. The or- nizing committee selected 176 papers for conference presentation (full papers) and 173 submissions for poster presentation (short papers).The papers included herein represent the forefront of research from China, USA, UK, Canada, Switzerland, Japan, Aust- lia, India, Korea, Singapore, Brazil, Norway, Greece, Iran, Turkey, Oman, Pakistan and other countries. More than 600 attendees participated in the technical section and the exhibition of the workshop.

This revised edition looks at how computers facilitate learning among groups of individuals. Taking account of the impact of the Internet and web-based learning, the text is aimed at those in the open and distance learning, education and training fields.