Sofsem 2001

SOFSEM 2001, the International Conference on Current Trends in Theory and Practice of Informatics, was held on November 24 – December 1, 2001 in the ? well-known spa Pie?stany, Slovak Republic. This was the 28th annual conference in the SOFSEM series organized either in the Slovak or the Czech Republic. SOFSEM has a well-established tradition. Currently it is a broad, multid- ciplinary conference, devoted to the theory and practice of software systems. Its aim is to foster cooperation among professionals from academia and industry working in various areas of informatics. The scienti?c program of SOFSEM consists of invited talks, which determine the topics of the conference, and short contributed talks presenting original - sults. The topics of the invited talks are chosen so as to cover the whole range from theory to practice and to bring interesting research areas to the attention of conference participants. For the year 2001, the following three directions were chosen for presentation by the SOFSEM Steering Committee: – Trends in Informatics – Enabling Technologies for Global Computing – Practical Systems Engineering and Applications The above directions were covered through 12 invited talks presented by pro- nent researchers. There were 18 contributed talks, selected by the international Program Committee from among 46 submitted papers. The conference was also accompanied by workshops on Electronic Commerce Systems (coordinated by H. D. Zimmermann) and Soft Computing (coordinated by P. H ́ajek).

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 29th Conference on Current Trends in Theory and Practice of Informatics, SOFSEM 2002, held in Milovy, Czech Republic, in November 2002. The volume presents 10 invited lectures and the report on a panel discussion on GRID computing together with 11 revised full papers selected from 22 submissions. Among the topics covered are system design and testing related theory, distributed and parallel systems, type theory, multimedia, databases, computer vision, and soft computing.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 30th Conference on Current Trends in Theory and Practice of Computer Science, SOFSEM 2004, held in Mern, Czech Republic, in January 2004. The volume presents 10 invited lectures and 22 full papers selected from 136 submissions. Among the topics covered are computer science theory, programming theory, database systems, information systems, cognitive technologies and Web technologies.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 30th Conference on Current Trends in Theory and Practice of Computer Science, SOFSEM 2004, held in Merín, Czech Republic, in January 2004. The volume presents 10 invited lectures and 22 full papers selected from 136 submissions. Among the topics covered are computer science theory, programming theory, database systems, information systems, cognitive technologies and Web technologies.

This book is an edited collection of chapters based on the papers presented at the conference “Beyond AI: Artificial Dreams” held in Pilsen in November 2012. The aim of the conference was to question deep-rooted ideas of artificial intelligence and cast critical reflection on methods standing at its foundations. Artificial Dreams epitomize our controversial quest for non-biological intelligence and therefore the contributors of this book tried to fully exploit such a controversy in their respective chapters, which resulted in an interdisciplinary dialogue between experts from engineering, natural sciences and humanities. While pursuing the Artificial Dreams, it has become clear that it is still more and more difficult to draw a clear divide between human and machine. And therefore this book tries to portrait such an image of what lies beyond artificial intelligence: we can see the disappearing human-machine divide, a very important phenomenon of nowadays technological society, the phenomenon which is often uncritically praised, or hypocritically condemned. And so this phenomenon found its place in the subtitle of the whole volume as well as in the title of the chapter of Kevin Warwick, one of the keynote speakers at “Beyond AI: Artificial Dreams”.

Processes and Foundations for Virtual Organizations contains selected articles from PRO-VE'03, the Fourth Working Conference on Virtual Enterprises, which was sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and held in Lugano, Switzerland in October 2003. This fourth edition includes a rich set of papers revealing the progress and achievements in the main current focus areas: -VO breeding environments; -Formation of collaborative networked organizations; -Ontologies and knowledge management; -Process models and interoperability; -Infrastructures; -Multi-agent approaches. In spite of many valid contributions in these areas, many research challenges remain. This is clearly stated in a number of papers suggesting a new research agenda and strategic research roadmaps for advanced virtual organizations. With the selected papers included in this book, PRO-VE pursues its double mission as a forum for presentation and discussion of achievements as well as a place to discuss and suggest new directions and research strategies.

This commemorative book celebrates the 70th birthday of Arto Kustaa Salomaa, one of the most influential researchers in theoretical computer science. The 24 invited papers by leading researchers in the area address a broad variety of topics in theoretical computer science and impressively reflect the breadth and the depth of Arto Salomaa's scientific work.