This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Developments in Language Theory, DLT 2008, held in Kyoto, Japan, September 2008. The 36 revised full papers presented together with 6 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 102 submissions. All important issues in language theory are addressed including grammars, acceptors and transducers for words, trees and graphs; algebraic theories of automata; algorithmic, combinatorial and algebraic properties of words and languages; variable length codes; symbolic dynamics; cellular automata; polyominoes and multidimensional patterns; decidability questions; image manipulation and compression; efficient text algorithms; relationships to cryptography, concurrency, complexity theory and logic; bio-inspired computing; quantum computing.

From August 27 to 31, 2000, the International Conference and Research Center for Computer Science in Schloss Dagstuhl, Dagstuhl for short, celebrated its 10th anniversary. Since its founding in 1990, the objective of the Center has been to promote world-class research in computer science, support leading-edge continuing education, and promote the exchange of knowledge and findings between academia and industry. It hosts research seminars at which promising young research scientists are afforded the opportunity of discussing their views and research findings with the international elite of their field in a specific cuttingedge field of computer science. The seminars enable new ideas to be showcased, topical problems to be discussed, and the course to be set for future development in this field. Roughly 15 000 scientists from all over the world and from all areas of computer science as well as from application areas have participated in about 500 meetings in Dagstuhl during these 10 years. They have all enjoyed the “Dagstuhl Magic”, as several guests have called it, guaranteeing creative and productive meetings.

This is the first book entirely dedicated to the problem of memory management in programming language implementation. Its originality stems from the diversity of languages and approaches presented: functional programming, logic programming, object oriented programming, and parallel and sequential programming. The book contains 29 selected and refereed papers including 3 survey papers, 4 on distributed systems, 4 on parallelism, 4 on functional languages, 3 on logic programming languages, 3 on object oriented languages, 3 on incremental garbage collection, 2 on improving locality, 2 on massively parallel architectures, and an invited paper on the thermodynamics of garbage collection. The book provides a snapshot of the latest research in the domain of memory management for high-level programming language implementations.

Legal Programming: Designing Legally Compliant RFID and Software Agent Architectures for Retail Processes and Beyond provides a process-oriented discussion of the legal concerns presented by agent-based technologies, processes and programming. It offers a general outline of the potential legal difficulties that could arise in relation to them, focusing on the programming of negotiation and contracting processes in a privacy, consumer and commercial context. The authors will elucidate how it is possible to create form of legal framework and design methodology for transaction agents, applicable in any environment and not just in a specific proprietary framework, that provides the right level of compliance and trust. Key elements considered include the design and programming of legally compliant methods, the determination of rights in respect of objects and variables, and ontologies and programming frameworks for agent interactions. Examples are used to illustrate the points made and provide a practical perspective.

For purposes of understanding its performance, a computer system is traditionally viewed as a processor coupled to one or more disk storage devices, and driven by externally generated requests (typically called transactions). Over the past several decades, very powerful techniques have become available to the performance analyst attempting to understand, at a high level, the operational behavior of such systems. Nevertheless, the ability of computers to rapidly deliver requested information, at the time it is needed, depends critically on an underlying structure whose operational behavior is not nearly as well understood: the memory hierarchy through which data stored on disk is made available to the processor. The memory hierarchy tends to consist of many levels, including one or more processor buffer memories (also called L1 and L2 cache), main processormemory, disk storage cache memory? disk storage, and often tape. A given level is usually configured to have both a much smaller storage capacity and a much faster access time than the level below it. The data stored in each memory level is managed dynamically, with new data being brought in as needed from the level below.

This monograph presents a novel concept of a mobile robot, which is a single-wheel, gyroscopically stabilized robot. The robot is balanced by a spinning wheel attached through a two-link manipulator at the wheel bearing, and actuated by a drive motor. This configuration conveys significant advantages including insensitivity to attitude disturbances, high maneuverability, low rolling resistance, ability to recover from falls, and amphibious capability for potential applications on both land and water. This book focuses on the dynamics and control aspects, including modeling, model-based control, learning-based control, and shared control with human operators. This novel mobile robot concept opens up the science of dynamically stable systems with a single wheel configuration. The book also presents considerations in concept, design implementations, and kinematics modeling, as well as experimental results from various algorithms and cases. The system is a nonholonomic, underactuated, and highly nonlinear system, so this book is appropriate for scientists and engineers with interests in mobile robot, dynamics and control, as a research reference and postgraduate textbook.

Information intermediation is the foundation stone of some of the most successful Internet companies, and is perhaps second only to the Internet Infrastructure companies. On the heels of information integration and interoperability, this book on information brokering discusses the next step in information interoperability and integration. The emerging Internet economy based on burgeoning B2B and B2C trading will soon demand semantics-based information intermediation for its feasibility and success. B2B ventures are involved in the `rationalization' of new vertical markets and construction of domain specific product catalogs. This book provides approaches for re-use of existing vocabularies and domain ontologies as a basis for this rationalization and provides a framework based on inter-ontology interoperation. Infrastructural trade-offs that identify optimizations in performance and scalability of web sites will soon give way to information based trade-offs as alternate rationalization schemes come into play and the necessity of interoperating across these schemes is realized. Information Brokering Across Heterogeneous Digital Data's intended readers are researchers, software architects and CTOs, advanced product developers dealing with information intermediation issues in the context of e-commerce (B2B and B2C), information technology professionals in various vertical markets (e.g., geo-spatial information, medicine, auto), and all librarians interested in information brokering.

Cells and Robots is an outcome of the multidisciplinary research extending over Biology, Robotics and Hybrid Systems Theory. It is inspired by modeling reactive behavior of the immune system cell population, where each cell is considered as an independent agent. In our modeling approach, there is no difference if the cells are naturally or artificially created agents, such as robots. This appears even more evident when we introduce a case study concerning a large-size robotic population scenario. Under this scenario, we also formulate the optimal control of maximizing the probability of robotic presence in a given region and discuss the application of the Minimum Principle for partial differential equations to this problem. Simultaneous consideration of cell and robotic populations is of mutual benefit for Biology and Robotics, as well as for the general understanding of multi-agent system dynamics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Joint Conference on Automated Reasoning, IJCAR 2008, held in Sydney, Australia, in August 2008. The 26 revised full research papers and 13 revised system descriptions presented together with 4 invited papers and a summary of the CASC-J4 systems competition were carefully reviewed and selected from 80 full paper and 17 system description submissions. The papers address the entire spectrum of research in automated reasoning and are organized in topical sections on specific theories, automated verification, protocol verification, system descriptions, modal logics, description logics, equational theories, theorem proving, CASC, the 4th IJCAR ATP system competition, logical frameworks, and tree automata.

For most adults, fairy tales are among the childish things we've put away. Alice Hoffman, however, feels differently. Practical Magic starts out as a tale of Gillian and Sally Owens, two orphaned girls whose aunts are witches–of a mild sort. For the past two centuries, Owens women have been blamed for all that has gone wrong in their Massachusetts town, ever since their ancestor arrived, rich, independent, and soon accused of theft: "And then one day, a farmer winged a crow in his cornfield, a creature who'd been stealing from him shamelessly for months…