Search

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies, DALT 2010, held in Toronto, Canada, on May 10, 2010, as a satellite workshop of the 9th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2010. The 7 revised full papers presented together with 4 invited lectures were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement from 24 initial submissions. DALT aims to make formal methods and declarative technologies and approaches available to and understood by a broader segment of the multi-agent research community; the papers are organized in topical sections on BDI rational agents, communication, coordination and negotiation, as well as social aspects and control systems.

This book constitutes the refereed post-proceedings of the Second International Conference on High Performance Networking, Computing, and Communication systems, ICHCC 2011, held in Singapore in May 2011. The conference was held together with the Second International Conference on Theoretical and Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science, ICTMF 2011, which proceedings are published in CCIS 164. The 84 revised selected papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The topics covered range from computational science, engineering and technology to digital signal processing, and computational biology to game theory, and other related topices.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Learning and Intelligent Optimization, LION 5, held in Rome, Italy, in January 2011. The 32 revised regular and 3 revised short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 99 submissions. In addition to the contributions to the general track there are 11 full papers and 3 short papers presented at the following four special sessions; IMON: Intelligent Multiobjective OptimizatioN, LION-PP: Performance Prediction Self• EAs: Self-tuning, self-configuring and self-generating evolutionary algorithms LION-SWAP: Software and Applications.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 9th International Conference on High Performance Computing for Computational Science, VECPAR 2010, held in Berkeley, CA, USA, in June 2010. The 34 revised full papers presented together with five invited contributions were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and revision. The papers are organized in topical sections on linear algebra and solvers on emerging architectures, large-scale simulations, parallel and distributed computing, numerical algorithms.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Integrated Circuit and System Design, PATMOS 2010, held in Grenoble, France, in September 2010. The 24 revised full papers presented and the 9 extended abstracts were carefully reviewed and are organized in topical sections on design flows; circuit techniques; low power circuits; self-timed circuits; process variation; high-level modeling of poweraware heterogeneous designs in SystemC-AMS; and minalogic.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the Third International Conference on Human-Robot Personal Relationships, held in Leiden, The Netherlands, in June 2010. The 16 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited papers and 1 keynote lecture were carefully reviewed and selected from 22 submissions. The papers feature and discuss studies of personal relationships with artificial partners, their formation, their possibilities and their consequences. Such personal relationships are increasingly attracting attention from scientific fields as (social) robotics, human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, psychology, philosophy, sociology.

This volume constitutes the revised selected papers of the 6th International Workshop, DALT 2008, held as satellite workshop of AAMAS 2008, the 7th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, in Estoril, Portugal, on May 12, 2008. The 12 papers, presented together with 3 invited papers, were carefully reviewed and selected from 14 submissions. The workshop provided a discussion forum to both (i) support the transfer of declarative paradigms and techniques to the broader community of agent researchers and practitioners, and (ii) to bring the issue of designing complex agent systems to the attention of researchers working on declarative languages and technologies.

Although everyone recognizes communication as a central concept in mul- agents, many no longer see agent communication as a research topic. Unf- tunately there seems to be a tendency to regard communication as a kind of information exchange that can easily be covered using the standard FIPA ACL. However, the papers in this volume show that research in agent communication is far from?nished. If we want to develop the full potential of multi-agent s- tems, agent communication should also develop to a level beyond parameter or value passing as is done in OO approaches! In this book we present the latest collection of papers around the topic of agentcommunication.Thecollectioncomprisesofthebestpapersfromtheagent communication workshops of 2005 and 2006, enriched with a few revised agent communication papers from the AAMAS conference. Due to some unfortunate circumstances the proceedings of the 2005 workshop were delayed, but it gave us the opportunity to join the best papers of the 2006 edition to this volume. Together these papers give a very good overview of the state of the art in this areaofresearchandgiveagoodindicationofthetopicsthatareofmajorinterest at the moment.

Im Zuge der Digitalisierung werden Gestaltung und Management der Digital Customer Experience zunehmend wertvoller. Technologieführer diverser Branchen sind besonders dafür bekannt, digitale Interaktionen zwischen Nutzern, Drittanbietern und weiteren Akteuren erfolgreich zu organisieren. In diesem essential wird die Videospieleplattform Steam mit der Fallstudienmethode untersucht. Basierend auf der Analyse von Steam werden Handlungsempfehlungen abgeleitet, die auch für Unternehmen in traditionellen Branchen anwendbar sind. Schwerpunkte bilden hierbei die Orientierung von Services und Serviceportfolio an Kundenbedürfnissen, das Management von Konsumententechnologie sowie die Entwicklung von Vertrauen und Loyalität durch Verankerung von Werten und Normen auf einer digitalen Plattform. Die Handlungsempfehlungen werden anschließend in der Automobilbranche, bei TV-Streaminganbietern und anhand einer Plattform für Autoreparaturen beispielhaft illustriert.Der AutorBenjamin Spottke lehrt und forscht am Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik der Universität St. Gallen.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the International Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary Computation, EvoApplications 2014, held in Granada, Spain, in April 2014, colocated with the Evo• 2014 events EuroGP, EvoCOP, and EvoMUSART.The 79 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 128 submissions. EvoApplications 2014 consisted of the following 13 tracks: EvoCOMNET (nature-inspired techniques for telecommunication networks and other parallel and distributed systems), EvoCOMPLEX (evolutionary algorithms and complex systems), EvoENERGY (evolutionary computation in energy applications), EvoFIN (evolutionary and natural computation in finance and economics), EvoGAMES (bio-inspired algorithms in games), EvoIASP (evolutionary computation in image analysis, signal processing, and pattern recognition), EvoINDUSTRY (nature-inspired techniques in industrial settings), EvoNUM (bio-inspired algorithms for continuous parameter optimization), EvoPAR (parallel implementation of evolutionary algorithms), EvoRISK (computational intelligence for risk management, security and defence applications), EvoROBOT (evolutionary computation in robotics), EvoSTOC (evolutionary algorithms in stochastic and dynamic environments), and EvoBio (EC and related techniques in bioinformatics and computational biology).

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies, DALT 2009, held in Budapest, Hungary, on May 11, 2009, as a satellite workshop of the 8th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2009. The 11 revised full papers presented together with 1 invited lecture and 3 invited papers from the AAMAS main conference - substantially enhanced after the workshop - were carefully selected from 17 initial submissions. The papers combine declarative and formal approaches with engineering and technology aspects of agents and multiagent systems and focus especially on areas such as the semantic web, service-oriented computing, web services, security, and electronic contracting.

Itisourpleasuretopresentthepapersacceptedforthe22ndInternationalWo- shop on Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing held during October 8–10 2009 in Newark Delaware, USA. Since 1986, LCPC has became a valuable venueforresearchersto reportonworkinthegeneralareaofparallelcomputing, high-performance computer architecture and compilers. LCPC 2009 continued this tradition and in particular extended the area of interest to new parallel computing accelerators such as the IBM Cell Processor and Graphic Processing Unit (GPU). This year we received 52 submissions from 15 countries. Each submission receivedatleastthreereviewsandmosthadfour.ThePCalsosoughtadditional externalreviewsforcontentiouspapers.ThePCheldanall-dayphoneconference on August 24 to discuss the papers. PC members who had a con?ict of interest were asked to leave the call temporarily when the corresponding papers were discussed. From the 52 submissions, the PC selected 25 full papers and 5 short paperstobeincludedintheworkshopproceeding,representinga58%acceptance rate. We were fortunate to have three keynote speeches, a panel discussion and a tutorial in this year's workshop. First, Thomas Sterling, Professor of Computer Science at Louisiana State University, gave a keynote talk titled “HPC in Phase Change: Towards a New Parallel Execution Model.” Sterling argued that a new multi-dimensional research thrust was required to realize the design goals with regard to power, complexity, clock rate and reliability in the new parallel c- puter systems.ParalleX,anexploratoryexecutionmodeldevelopedbySterling's group was introduced to guide the co-design of new architectures, programming methods and system software.

ICISC 2009, the 12th International Conference on Information Security and Cryptology, was held in Seoul, Korea, during December 2–4, 2009. It was - ganized by the Korea Institute of Information Security and Cryptology (KIISC) and the Ministry of Public Administration and Security (MOPAS). The aim of this conference was to provide a forum for the presentation of new results in research, development, and applications in the?eld of information security and cryptology. It also served as a place for research information exchange. The conference received 88 submissions from 22 countries, covering all areas of inf- mation security and cryptology. The review and selection processes were carried out in two stages by the Program Committee (PC) comprising 57 prominent - searchers via online meetings. First, at least three PC members blind-reviewed each paper, and papers co-authored by the PC members were reviewed by at least?ve PC members. Second, individual review reports were revealed to PC members, and detailed interactive discussion on each paper followed. Through this process,thePC?nally selected 25papers from15countries. The acceptance rate was 28. 4%. The authors of selected papers had a few weeks to prepare for their?nal versions based on the comments received from more than 80 ext- nal reviewers. The conference featured one tutorial and one invited talk. The tutorial was given by Amit Sahai from the University of California and the talk ´ was given by Michel Abdalla from Ecole normale sup´ erieure.

Software architectures that contain many dynamically interacting components, each with their own thread of control, and engaging in complex coordination protocols, are difficult to correctly and efficiently engineer. Agent-oriented modelling techniques are important for supporting the design and development of such applications. This book provides a diverse and interesting overview of the work that is currently being undertaken by a growing number of researchers and research groups in the area of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering. The papers present leading edge research in this field, which is of critical importance in facilitating industry take-up of powerful agent technologies. This volume constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, AOSE 2006, held in Hakodate, Japan, in May 2006 as part of AAMAS 2006. The 13 revised full papers were carefully selected from numerous submissions during two rounds of reviewing and improvement and have been complemented by invited papers from leading researchers in the field. The papers are organized in topical sections on modelling and design of agent systems, modelling open agent systems, formal reasoning about designs, as well as testing, debugging and evolvability.

As information technologies (IT) become specialized and fragmented, it is easy to lose sight that many topics in IT have common threads and because of this, advances in one sub-discipline may transmit to another. The presentation of results between di?erent sub-disciplines of IT encourages this interchange for the advancement of IT as a whole. Of particular interest is the hybrid approach or combining ideas from one discipline with those of another to achieve a result that is more signi?cant than the sum of the individual parts. Through this hybrid philosophy, a new or common principle can be discovered which has the propensity to propagate throughout this multifaceted discipline. This volume comprises the selection of extended versions of papers that were presentedintheirshortenedformatthe2006InternationalConferenceonHybrid InformationTechnology(http://www.sersc.org/ICHIT2006/).Sixty-four papers out of the 235 that were published in ICHIT 2006 electronic proceedings were deemed suitable for inclusion in this volume, in a selection that was guided by technical quality and relevance to the balance of topics in hybrid information technology. The conference re?ected a change in the thinking of scientists and practitioners,whonowtendtojointheire?ortswithinmultidisciplinaryprojects. As a consequence, the readers may observe that many papers might conceivably be classi?ed into more than one chapter, given their interdisciplinary scope. The contributions in this monograph are clustered into six chapters: Data Analysis, Modeling, and Learning (11 papers); Imaging, Speech, and Complex Data (11 papers); Applications of Arti?cial Intelligence (11 papers); Hybrid, Smart, and UbiquitousSystems(11papers);HardwareandSoftwareEngineering(9papers); as well as Networking andTelecommunications (11 papers).

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing, LCPC 2005, held in Hawthorne, NY, USA in October 2005. The 26 revised full papers and eight short papers presented were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers are organized in topical sections.

We are proud to present the TAMODIA 2006 proceedings. In 2006, the TA- MODIA workshop celebrated its?fth anniversary. TAMODIA is an obscure acronym that stands for TAsk MOdels and DIAgrams for user interface - sign. The?rst edition of TAMODIA was organized in Bucharest (Romania) by Costin Pribeanu and Jean Vanderdonckt. The fact that?ve years later the TAMODIAseriesofworkshopsstillcontinuessuccessfullyprovestheimportance of this research area for the human–computer interaction community! The?rst workshopaimed at examining how multiple forms of task expressionscan sign- icantly increase or decrease the quality of user interface design. This is still the scope of the current edition; we tried to assemble papers that discuss how the complexity of HCI design and development can be managed with tasks, models and diagrams. Much like the previous editions, the selection of papers from the 2006 edition re?ects the broad scope of this?eld, which cannot be labeled with a single title or term. The invited paper is by Jo¨ elle Coutaz and discusses meta-user interfaces for ambient spaces. Finding appropriate ways to design and develop user interfaces for interactive spaces is becoming an important challenge for the creation of future usable applications. This exciting work gives a good feel of the new type of user interfaces and the required new approaches we are evolving toward when we want to realize the vision of ambient intelligent environments and create systems that can be used and controlled by the end-users.

OnbehalfoftheOrganizingCommitteewearepleasedtopresenttheproceedings ofthe2007SymposiumonSoftwareComposition(SC2007).ThegoalofSC2007 wastobringtogethertheresearchandindustrialcommunitiesinordertoaddress the challenges of the component-based softwaredevelopment approach. SC 2007 was the sixth symposium on software composition in the SC series that seeks to develop a better understanding of how software components may be used to build and maintain large software systems. This LNCS volume contains the revised versions of the papers presented at SC 2007, which was held as a satellite event of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software (ETAPS) in Braga, Portugal, March 24–25, 2007. The symposium began with a keynote on “Composition by Anonymous Parties” by Farhad Arbab (CWI and Leiden University). The main program consisted of six technical sessions related to speci?c aspects of component-based software development. In response to the call for papers, we received 59 submissions from over 20 countries and 6 continents. Each paper was reviewed by at least three Program Committeemembers.TheentirereviewingprocesswassupportedbyMicrosoft's Conference Management Toolkit. In total, 15 submissions were accepted as full papers and 5 submissions were accepted as short papers.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th InternationalWorkshop on Numerical Software Verification, NSV 2016, held in Toronto, ON, Canada in July 2011 - colocated with CAV 2016, the 28th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification. The NSV workshop is dedicated to the development of logical and mathematical techniques for the reasoning about programmability and reliability.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on ICT in Education, Research, and Industrial Applications, held in Kherson, Ukraine, in June 2012. The 14 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 70 submissions. This book begins with an invited contribution presenting the substance of one of ICTERI 2012 invited talks. The chapter deals with the issues of abstraction and verification of properties in real-time Java programs. The rest of the volume is structured in four topical parts: ICT Frameworks, Infrastructures, Integration, and Deployment; Formal Logic and Knowledge-Based Frameworks; ICT-Based Systems Modeling, Specification, and Verification: ICT in Teaching and Learning.

This volume includes the proceedings of all the?ve workshops that were held as part of the International Conference on Service-Oriented Systems 2007 (ICSOC 2007): – Mashups 2007: First International Workshop on Web APIs and Services Mashups – NFPSLA-SOC 2007: Workshop on Non-Functional Properties and Service Level Agreements in Service-Oriented Computing – SeMSoc 2007: Second International SeMSoC Workshop Business-Oriented Aspects Concerning Semantics and Methodologies in Service-Oriented Computing – TSOA 2007: First International Workshop on Telecom Service-Oriented Architectures – WESOA2007:ThirdInternationalWorkshoponEngineeringService-Oriented Applications: Analysis, Design and Composition These workshops o?ered interesting presentations and discussions on a wide rangeofhottopicsinservice-orientedcomputing:developmentofmashups,m- agement of non-functional properties and service level agreements, engineering approaches, and semantic methodologies. Also, the crucial application domain of telecom services and service architectures was investigated. The?ve workshops were selected out of eight submissions. During the - lection process we encouraged the merging of workshop proposals with similar scope. We are grateful to all workshop organizers. Without their valuable ideas and support the workshop sessions at ICSOC as well as this volume would not have been possible. We also thank all authors for their active participation in the events, for the quality of their papers, and for being patient with us during the long process of compilation of this volume.

The2009InternationalWorkshoponAgentsandDataMiningInteraction(ADMI 2009) was a joint event with AAMAS2009. In recentyears,agents and data mining interaction (ADMI), or agent mining forshort,hasemergedasaverypromisingresearch?eld. Followingthesuccessof ADMI 2006 in Hong Kong, ADMI 2007 in San Jose, and ADMI 2008 in Sydney, the ADMI 2009 workshop in Budapest provided a premier forum for sharing research and engineering results, as well as potential challenges and prospects encountered in the synergy between agents and data mining. As usual, the ADMI workshop encouraged and promoted theoretical and applied research and development, which aims at: – Exploitingagent-drivendatamininganddemonstratinghowintelligentagent technology can contribute to critical data mining problems in theory and practice – Improving data mining-driven agents and showing how data mining can strengthen agent intelligence in research and practical applications – Exploring the integration of agents and data mining toward a super-intelligent information processing and systems – Identifying challenges and directions for future research on the synergy between agents and data mining ADMI 2009 featured two invited talks and twelve selected papers. The?rst invited talk was on “Agents and Data Mining in Bioinformatics,” with the s- ond focusing on “Knowledge-Based Reinforcement Learning. ” The ten accepted papers are from seven countries. A majority of submissions came from Eu- pean countries, indicating the boom of ADMI research in Europe. In addition the two invited papers, addressed fundamental issues related to agent-driven data mining, data mining-driven agents, and agent mining applications. The proceedings of the ADMI workshops will be published as part of the LNAIseriesbySpringer.WeappreciatethesupportofSpringer,andinparticular Alfred Hofmann.

ThesearetheproceedingsoftheInternationalWorkshoponProgrammingMulti- Agent Systems (ProMAS 2008), the sixth of a series of workshops that is aimed at discussing and providing an overview of current state-of-the-art technology for programming multi-agent systems. The aim of the ProMAS workshop series is to promote research on progr- ming technologies and tools that can e?ectively contribute to the development and deployment of multi-agent systems. In particular, the workshop promotes the discussion and exchange of ideas concerning the techniques, concepts, - quirements, and principles that are important for establishing multi-agent p- gramming platforms that are useful in practice and have a theoretically sound basis. Topics addressed include but are not limited to the theory and app- cations of agent programming languages, the veri?cation and analysis of agent systems,aswellastheimplementationofsocialstructureinagent-basedsystems (e. g.,roleswithin organizations,coordinationandcommunicationin multi-agent systems). In its previous editions, ProMAS constituted an invaluable occasion bringing together leading researchers from both academia and industry to discuss issues on the design of programming languages and tools for multi-agent systems. We were very pleased to be able to again present a range of high-quality papers at ProMAS 2008. After?ve successful editions of the ProMAS workshop series, which took place during AAMAS 2003 (Melbourne, Australia), AAMAS 2004 (New York, USA), AAMAS 2005 (Utrecht, The Netherlands), AAMAS 2006 (Hakodate, Japan), and AAMAS 2007 (Honolulu, Hawai'i), the sixth edition took place on May 13 in Estoril, Portugal, in conjunction with AAMAS 2008, the main international conference on autonomous agents and MAS.

The two volume set LNCS 5506 and LNCS 5507 constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Neural Information Processing, ICONIP 2008, held in Auckland, New Zealand, in November 2008. The 260 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous ordinary paper submissions and 15 special organized sessions. 116 papers are published in the first volume and 112 in the second volume. The contributions deal with topics in the areas of data mining methods for cybersecurity, computational models and their applications to machine learning and pattern recognition, lifelong incremental learning for intelligent systems, application of intelligent methods in ecological informatics, pattern recognition from real-world information by svm and other sophisticated techniques, dynamics of neural networks, recent advances in brain-inspired technologies for robotics, neural information processing in cooperative multi-robot systems.

th This book contains the best papers of the 5 International Conference on e-Business and Telecommunications (ICETE), which was held in July 2008, in Porto, Portugal. This conference reflects a continuing effort to increase the dissemination of recent research results among professionals who work in the areas of e-business and te- communications. ICETE is a joint international conference integrating four major areas of knowledge that are divided into four corresponding conferences: ICE-B (- ternational Conf. on e-Business), SECRYPT (International Conf. on Security and Cryptography), SIGMAP (Int'l Conf. on Signal Processing and Multimedia) and WINSYS (International Conf. on Wireless Information Systems). The program of this joint conference included several outstanding keynote lectures presented by internationally renowned distinguished researchers who are experts in the various ICETE areas. Their keynote speeches have contributed to heightening the overall quality of the program and significance of the theme of the conference. The conference topic areas define a broad spectrum in the key areas of e-business and telecommunications. This wide-view reporting made ICETE appealing to a global au- ence of engineers, scientists, business practitioners and policy experts. The papers - cepted and presented at the conference demonstrated a number of new and innovative solutions for e-business and telecommunication networks and systems, showing that the technical problems in these closely related fields are challenging and worthwhile - proaching an interdisciplinary perspective such as that promoted by ICETE.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Trustworthy Global Computing, TGC 2008 held in Barcelona, Spain, in November 2008. The 12 revised papers presented together with one invited paper were carefully selected from 26 submissions during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The TGC 2008 symposium papers focus on providing tools and frameworks for constructing well-behaved applications and for reasoning about their behavior and properties in models of computation that incorporate code and data mobility over distributed networks with highly dynamic topologies and heterogeneous devices.

Agent and multiagent concepts offer higher level abstractions and mechanisms which address issues such as knowledge representation and reasoning, communication, coordination, cooperation among heterogeneous and autonomous parties, perception, commitments, goals, beliefs, and intentions all of which need conceptual modeling. The AOSE 2005 workshop sought to examine the credentials of agent-based approaches as a software engineering paradigm, and to gain an insight into what agent-oriented software engineering will look like, and what its benefits will be. This book represents the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, AOSE 2005, held in Utrecht, The Netherlands, in July 2005 as part of AAMAS 2005. The 18 revised full papers were carefully selected from 35 submissions during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers are organized in topical sections on modeling tools, analysis and validation tools, multiagent systems design, implementation tools, and experiences and comparative evaluations.

The area of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems (MAS) has grown into a promising technology offering sensible alternatives for the design of distributed, intelligent systems. Several efforts have been made by researchers and practitioners, both in academia and industry, and by several standardisation consortia in order to provide new languages, tools, methods, and frameworks so as to establish the necessary standards for a wide use of MAS technology. The papers of this volume focus on the development of programming languages and tools that can effectively support MAS programming and the implementation of key notions in MAS in a unified framework to bridge the gap from analysis and design to effective implementation that way. This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed postproceedings of the Third International Workshop on Programming Multi-Agent Systems, ProMAS 2005, held in Utrecht, The Netherlands in July 2005 as an associated event of AAMAS 2005, the main international conference on autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. The 14 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited articles are organized in topical sections on multi-agent techniques and issues, multi-agent programming, and multi-agent platforms and organisation.

In 2008 the Workshop on Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing left the USA to celebrate its 21st anninversary in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Following its long-established tradition, the workshop focused on topics at the frontierofresearchanddevelopmentinlanguages,optimizingcompilers,appli- tions, and programming models for high-performance computing. While LCPC continues to focus on parallel computing, the 2008 edition included the pres- tation of papers on program analysis that are precursors of high performance in parallel environments. LCPC 2008 received 35 paper submissions. Eachpaper received at least three independent reviews, and then the papers and the referee comments were d- cussed during a Program Committee meeting. The PC decided to accept 18 papers as regular papers and 6 papers as short papers. The short papers appear at the end of this volume. The LCPC 2008 program was fortunate to include two keynote talks. Keshav Pingali's talk titled “Amorphous Data Parallelism in Irregular Programs” - gued that irregular programs have data parallelism in the iterative processing of worklists. Pingali described the Galois system developed at The University of Texas at Austin to exploit this kind of amorphous data parallelism. The second keynote talk, “Generic ParallelAlgorithms in Threading Building Bocks (TBB),” presented by Arch Robison from Intel Corporation addressed very practical aspects of using TBB, a production C++ library, for generic p- allel programming and contrasted TBB with the Standard Template Library (STL).

This book contains selected and revised papers of the European Symposium on Adaptive and Learning Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (ALAMAS), editions 2005, 2006 and 2007, held in Paris, Brussels and Maastricht. The goal of the ALAMAS symposia, and this associated book, is to increase awareness and interest in adaptation and learning for single agents and mul- agent systems, and encourage collaboration between machine learning experts, softwareengineeringexperts,mathematicians,biologistsandphysicists,andgive a representative overviewof current state of a?airs in this area. It is an inclusive forum where researchers can present recent work and discuss their newest ideas for a?rst time with their peers. Thesymposiaseriesfocusesonallaspectsofadaptiveandlearningagentsand multi-agent systems, with a particular emphasis on how to modify established learning techniques and/or create new learning paradigms to address the many challenges presented by complex real-world problems. These symposia were a great success and provided a forum for the pres- tation of new ideas and results bearing on the conception of adaptation and learning for single agents and multi-agent systems. Over these three editions we received 51 submissions, of which 17 were carefully selected, including one invited paper of this year's invited speaker Simon Parsons. This is a very c- petitive acceptance rate of approximately 31%, which, together with two review cycles, has led to a high-quality LNAI volume. We hope that our readers will be inspired by the papers included in this volume.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies, DALT 2007, held in Honolulu, USA, in 2007. It was an associated event of AAMAS 2007, the conference on autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. The 11 full papers, together with 1 keynote lecture and 2 invited papers from the AAMAS main conference were carefully selected and substantially enhanced after the workshop.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing, LCPC 2007, held in Urbana, IL, USA, in October 2007. The 23 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 49 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on reliability, languages, parallel compiler technology, libraries, run-time systems and performance analysis, and general compiler techniques.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 8th International Conference on High Performance Computing for Computational Science, VECPAR 2008, held in Toulouse, France, in June 2008. The 51 revised full papers presented together with the abstract of a surveying and look-ahead talk were carefully reviewed and selected from 73 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on parallel and distributed computing, cluster and grid computing, problem solving environment and data centric, numerical methods, linear algebra, computing in geosciences and biosciences, imaging and graphics, computing for aerospace and engineering, and high-performance data management in grid environments.

Researchers and professionals will find in this text the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Third International Conference on the Quality of Software Architectures, QoSA 2007, held in Medford, MA, USA, in 2007. It was mounted in conjunction with the 10th International ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on Component-Based Software Engineering, CBSE 2007. The 13 revised full papers presented together with one keynote lecture were carefully reviewed and selected from 42 submissions.

Running to more than 360 pages, and complete with online files and updates, this book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 11th Asian Computing Science Conference, ASIAN 2006, held in Tokyo, Japan. The 17 revised full papers and 8 revised short papers presented together with 1 invited paper were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing from 115 submissions. The papers cover theory, practice, applications, and experiences related to secure software.

This book constitutes thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 8th Asian Symposium on Computer Mathematics, ASCM 2007, held in Singapore in December 2007. The 22 revised full papers and 5 revised poster papers presented together with 3 invited lectures were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement from 65 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on algorithms and implementations, numerical methods and applications, cryptology, and computational logic.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Semantics in Data and Knolwedge Bases, SDKB 2008, held in Nantes, France, on March 29, 2008. The 6 revised full papers presented together with 4 invited papers and a survey on the state of the art in the field, were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The SDKB workshop presented original contributions demonstrating the use of logic, discrete mathematics, combinatorics, domain theory and other mathematical theories of semantics for database and knowledge bases, computational linguistics and semiotics, and information and knowledge-based systems.

The development of modern complex software-intensive systems often involves the use of multiple DSMLs that capture different system aspects. Supporting coordinated use of DSMLs leads to what we call the globalization of modeling languages, that is, the use of multiple modeling languages to support coordinated development of diverse aspects of a system. In this book, a number of articles describe the vision and the way globalized DSMLs currently assist integrated DSML support teams working on systems that span many domains and concerns to determine how their work on a particular aspect influences work on other aspects. Globalized DSMLs offer support for communicating relevant information, and for coordinating development activities and associated technologies within and across teams, in addition to providing support for imposing control over development artifacts produced by multiple teams. DSMLs can be used to support socio-technical coordination by providing the means for stakeholders to bridge the gap between how they perceive a problem and its solution, and the programming technologies used to implement a solution. They also support coordination of work across multiple teams. DSMLs developed in an independent manner to meet the specific needs of domain experts have an associated framework that regulates interactions needed to support collaboration and work coordination across different system domains. The articles in the book describe how multiple heterogeneous modeling languages (or DSMLs) can be related to determine how different aspects of a system influence each other. The book includes a research roadmap that broadens the current DSML research focus beyond the development of independent DSMLs to one that provides support for globalized DSMLs.

This Festschrift volume is published in honor of Professor Paul G. Spirakis on the occasion of his 60th birthday. It celebrates his significant contributions to computer science as an eminent, talented, and influential researcher and most visionary thought leader, with a great talent in inspiring and guiding young researchers. The book is a reflection of his main research activities in the fields of algorithms, probability, networks, and games, and contains a biographical sketch as well as essays and research contributions from close collaborators and former PhD students.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Computers and Games, CG 2010, held in Kanazawa, Japan, in September 2010. The 24 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this book. They cover a wide range of topics such as monte-carlo tree search, proof-number search, UCT algorithm, scalability, parallelization, opening books, knowledge abstraction, solving games, consultation of players, multi-player games, extraversion, and combinatorial game theory. In addition a wide range of computer games is dealt with, such as Chinese Checkers, Chinese Chess, Connect6, Go, Havannah, Lines of Action, Pckomino, Shogi, Surakarta, and Yahtzee.

Swarm robotics is the study of how large numbers of relatively simple physically embodied agentscanbe designedsuchthat a desiredcollectivebehavioremerges from the local interactions among agents and between the agents and the en- ronment. Swarm robotics has emerged as a novel approach to the coordination of large numbers of robots and is inspired from observation of social insects – ants, termites, wasps and bees – which stand as fascinating examples of how a large number of simple individuals can interact to create collectively intelligent systems. Socialinsects areknownto coordinatetheir actionsto accomplishtasks that are far beyond the capabilities of a single individual: termites build large and complex mounds, army ants organize impressive foraging raids, ants can collectively carry large prey. Such coordination capabilities are still well beyond the reach of current multi-robot systems. Researchon swarmroboticshasseen a signi?cantincreasein the last 5 years. A number of successful swarm robotic systems have now been demonstrated in the laboratory and the study of the design, modelling, implementation and analysis of swarm robotic systems has become a hot topic of research. This workshop was organized within SAB 2006, as a sequel to the successful?rst swarmroboticsworkshopin2004,withtheaimofreviewingandupdatingrecent advances on the topic. We received 21 full papers (20 research + 1 review) and accepted 14 (13 research + 1 review). Overall, we, as organizers, were pleased with the number of submissions, and a number of our reviewers explicitly commented on the generally high quality of the papers.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 7th International Conference on High Performance Computing for Computational Science, VECPAR 2006, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in June 2006. The 44 revised full papers presented together with one invited paper and 12 revised workshop papers cover Grid computing, cluster computing, numerical methods, large-scale simulations in Physics, and computing in Biosciences.

In recent years, social and organizational aspects of agency have become major research topics in MAS. Recent applications of MAS on Web services, grid c- puting and ubiquitous computing highlight the need for using these aspects in order to ensure social order within such environments. Openness, heterogeneity, and scalability of MAS, in turn, pose new demands on traditional MAS int- action models and bring forward the need to look into the environment where agents interact and at di?erent ways of constraining or regulating interactions. Consequently, the view of coordination and governance has been expanding to entertain not only an agent-centric perspective but societal and organizati- centric views as well. The overall problem of analyzing the social, legal, economic, and technolo- caldimensionsofagentorganizations,andthe co-evolutionofagentinteractions, provide theoretically demanding and interdisciplinary research questions at d- ferent levels of abstraction. The MAS research community has addressed these issues from di?erent perspectives that have gradually become more cohesive around the four notions in the title to the workshop: coordination, organization, institutions, and norms. The COIN workshops are thus designed to consolidate the subject by providing focus events that reach researchers from diverse c- munities working in related topics and facilitate more systematic discussion of themes that have been treated from various perspectives. This year, the COIN workshops were hosted during AAMAS 2006, (on June 9,in Hakodate,Japan)and ECAI2006(on August28,in Rivadel Garda,Italy). The papers contained in this volume are the revised versions of a selection of thosethatwerepresented in these workshops.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 20th Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, AICS 2009, held in Dublin, Ireland in August 2009. The 32 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The topics covered are classification techniques, biologically-inspired computation, natural language processing, and applications of AI techniques for the social Web and financial markets.

The Second International Conference on High-Performance Computing and Appli- tions (HPCA 2009) was a follow-up event of the successful HPCA 2004. It was held in Shanghai, a beautiful, active, and modern city in China, August 10–12, 2009. It served as a forum to present current work by researchers and software developers from around the world as well as to highlight activities in the high-performance c- puting area. It aimed to bring together research scientists, application pioneers, and software developers to discuss problems and solutions and to identify new issues in this area. This conference emphasized the development and study of novel approaches for high-performance computing, the design and analysis of high-performance - merical algorithms, and their scientific, engineering, and industrial applications. It offered the conference participants a great opportunity to exchange the latest research results, heighten international collaboration, and discuss future research ideas in HPCA. In addition to 24 invited presentations, the conference received over 300 contr- uted submissions from over ten countries and regions worldwide, about 70 of which were accepted for presentation at HPCA 2009. The conference proceedings contain some of the invited presentations and contributed submissions, and cover such research areas of interest as numerical algorithms and solutions, high-performance and grid c- puting, novel approaches to high-performance computing, massive data storage and processing, hardware acceleration, and their wide applications.

QUANTUMCOMM 2009––the International Conference on Quantum Communi- tion and Quantum Networking (from satellite to nanoscale)––took place in Vico Equense near Naples, Italy, during October 26–30, 2009. The conference made a significant step toward stimulating direct dialogue between the communities of quantum physics and quantum information researchers who work with photons, atoms, and electrons in pursuit of the common goal of investigating and utilizing the transfer of physical information between quantum systems. This meeting brought together experts in quantum communication, quantum inf- mation processing, quantum nanoscale physics, quantum photonics, and networking. In the light of traditional approaches to quantum information processing, quantum communication mainly deals with encoding and securely distributing quantum states of light in optical fiber or in free space in order to provide the technical means for quantum cryptography applications. Exciting advances in the area of quantum c- munication over the last decade have made the metropolitan quantum network a re- ity. Several papers presented at this meeting have demonstrated that quantum crypt- raphy is approaching the point of becoming a high-tech application rather than a - search subject. The natural distance limitation of quantum cryptography has been significantly augmented using ideas of global quantum communication with stab- orbit satellites. The results presented at this conference demonstrated that practical secure satellite communication is clearly within reach.

Research in software composition investigates models and techniques to build systems from prede?ned, pretested, reusable components instead of building them from scratch. In recent years, this idea has largely been adopted by - dustry. In the shape of service-oriented architecture, software composition has becomeanin?uentialdesignparadigm,especiallyforthe (re-)organizationofthe IT infrastructure of organizations.On the technical level, the standardization of Web services and other composition technologies has further matured. Current research in software composition aims at (further) developing c- position models and techniques. The aspect-oriented programming and design paradigm, for instance, has gained interest in the research community as a c- position (support) model. Other current research questions concern the sp- i?cation of component contracts, in particular making explicit its observable behavior, and methods of correct components composition. The International Symposium on Software Composition provides a premier forum for discussing these kinds of research questions and presenting original research results. This LNCS volume contains the proceedings of the 5th International S- posium on Software Composition, which was held as a satellite event of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software (ETAPS) in Vienna, Austria, March, 25-26 2006. The symposium started with a keynote on “Semantically Enabled Service-Oriented Architectures” given by Dieter Fensel, DirectoroftheDigitalResearchInstitute.Themainprogramconsistedofpres- tations of research papers on software compositions. These proceedings contain the revised versions of the papers presented at SC 2006.

This volume is based on the contributions to the International Workshop on the Web and Databases (WebDB'98), held in Valencia, Spain, March 27 and 28, 1998, in conjunction with the Sixth International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT'98). In response to the workshop call for papers, 37 manuscripts were submitted to the program committee. The review process was conducted entirely by- mail. While the quality of submissions was generally high, only 16 papers could be accepted for presentation within the limited time allowed by the workshop schedule. Authors of workshop papers were invited to submit extended versions oftheirpapersforpublicationinthesepost-workshopproceedings.The13papers appearing in this volume were submitted and selected after a second round of reviews. We would like to thank the program committee of WebDB'98, all those who submitted their work, all additional reviewers, and the conference o?cials of EBDT'98 for their invaluable support. Special thanks go to Paolo Merialdo, who actively participated in the organization of the workshop.

The Ninth International Workshop on Persistent Object Systems (POS 9) took place at the SAS Radisson Hotel in Lillehammer, Norway, from 6th to 8th September 2000. Previous workshops in the series have been held in Scotland (1 and 2), Australia (3), the USA (4), Italy (5), France (6), and the USA (7 and 8). In keeping with those workshops, POS 9 was short but intensive, fitting 28 papers and panel sessions, a boat 1 excursion, and some memorable meals into two and a half days. The participants'concentration was no doubt helped by the Northern European weather that prevailed for most of the workshop. Continuing a trend experienced over the previous few workshops, POS 9 had difficulty attracting a high number of papers. Of course it is hard to tell whether this is a problem with the field of persistent systems itself, or merely a consequence of the increasing number of workshops, conferences, and journals competing for submissions. In his Epilogue to the proceedings, Ron Morrison makes some interesting suggestions for possible improvements to future POS workshops. Out of a total of 26 submitted papers, 19 were accepted for presentation at the 2 workshop. Breaking down by region, 6 1/2 came from the USA, 1 from Africa, 3 1/2 from Australia, and 8 from Europe. In a new development for POS, an equal number of papers came from England and from Scotland.

The aim of the FMICS workshop series is to provide a forum for researchers who are interested in the development and application of formal methods in industry. In particular, these workshops are intended to bring together scientists and practitioners who are active in the area of formal methods and interested in exchanging their experiences in the industrial usage of these methods. These workshopsalso striveto promoteresearchand developmentfor the improvement of formal methods and tools for industrial applications. The topics for which contributions to FMICS 2008 were solicited included, but were not restricted to, the following: – Design, speci?cation, code generation and testing based on formal methods – Veri?cation and validation of complex, distributed, real-time systems and embedded systems – Veri?cation and validation methods that address shortcomings of existing methods with respect to their industrial applicability (e. g., scalability and usability issues) – Tools for the development of formal design descriptions – Case studies and experience reports on industrial applications of formal methods, focusing on lessons learned or identi?cation of new research - rections – Impact of the adoption of formal methods on the development process and associated costs – Application of formal methods in standardization and industrial forums The workshop included six sessions of regular contributions in the areas of model checking, testing, software veri?cation, real-time performance, and ind- trial case studies. There were also three invited presentations, given by Steven Miller,Rance Cleaveland,and Werner Damm, coveringthe applicationof formal methods in the avionics and automotive industries.