Semiring theory stands with a foot in each of two mathematical domains. The first being abstract algebra and the other the fields of applied mathematics such as optimization theory, the theory of discrete-event dynamical systems, automata theory, and formal language theory, as well as from the allied areas of theoretical computer science and theoretical physics. Most important applications of semiring theory in these areas turn out to revolve around the problem of finding the equalizer of a pair of affine maps between two semimodules. In this volume, we chart the state of the art on solving this problem, and present many specific cases of applications. This book is essentially the third part of a trilogy, along with Semirings and their Applications, and Power Algebras over Semirings, both written by the same author and published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1999. While each book can be read independently of the others, to get the full force of the theory and applications one should have access to all three. This work will be of interest to academic and industrial researchers and graduate students. The intent of the book is to bring the applications to the attention of the abstract mathematicians and to make the abstract mathematics available to those who are using these tools in an ad-hoc manner without realizing the full force of the theory.

In the summer of 1956, John McCarthy organized the famous Dartmouth Conference which is now commonly viewed as the founding event for the field of Artificial Intelligence. During the last 50 years, AI has seen a tremendous development and is now a well-established scientific discipline all over the world. Also in Europe AI is in excellent shape, as witnessed by the large number of high quality papers in this publication. In comparison with ECAI 2004, there’s a strong increase in the relative number of submissions from Distributed AI / Agents and Cognitive Modelling. Knowledge Representation & Reasoning is traditionally strong in Europe and remains the biggest area of ECAI-06. One reason the figures for Case-Based Reasoning are rather low is that much of the high quality work in this area has found its way into prestigious applications and is thus represented under the heading of PAIS.

A collection of articles showcasing the achievements of young Russian researchers in combinatorial and algebraic geometry and topology.

Algebra, as we know it today, consists of many different ideas, concepts and results. A reasonable estimate of the number of these different items would be somewhere between 50,000 and 200,000. Many of these have been named and many more could (and perhaps should) have a name or a convenient designation. Even the nonspecialist is likely to encounter most of these, either somewhere in the literature, disguised as a definition or a theorem or to hear about them and feel the need for more information. If this happens, one should be able to find enough information in this Handbook to judge if it is worthwhile to pursue the quest. In addition to the primary information given in the Handbook, there are references to relevant articles, books or lecture notes to help the reader. An excellent index has been included which is extensive and not limited to definitions, theorems etc. The Handbook of Algebra will publish articles as they are received and thus the reader will find in this third volume articles from twelve different sections. The advantages of this scheme are two-fold: accepted articles will be published quickly and the outline of the Handbook can be allowed to evolve as the various volumes are published. A particularly important function of the Handbook is to provide professional mathematicians working in an area other than their own with sufficient information on the topic in question if and when it is needed.- Thorough and practical source of information - Provides in-depth coverage of new topics in algebra - Includes references to relevant articles, books and lecture notes

This two volume set (CCIS 610 and 611) constitute the proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Information processing and Management of Uncertainty in Knowledge-Based Systems, IPMU 2016, held in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, in June 2016. The 127 revised full papers presented together with four invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on fuzzy measures and integrals; uncertainty quantification with imprecise probability; textual data processing; belief functions theory and its applications; graphical models; fuzzy implications functions; applications in medicine and bioinformatics; real-world applications; soft computing for image processing; clustering; fuzzy logic, formal concept analysis and rough sets; graded and many-valued modal logics; imperfect databases; multiple criteria decision methods; argumentation and belief revision; databases and information systems; conceptual aspects of data aggregation and complex data fusion; fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic; decision support; comparison measures; machine learning; social data processing; temporal data processing; aggregation.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Relational and Algebraic Methods in Computer Science, RAMiCS 2015, held in Braga, Portugal, in September/October 2015. The 20 revised full papers and 3 invited papers presented were carefully selected from 25 submissions. The papers deal with the theory of relation algebras and Kleene algebras, process algebras; fixed point calculi; idempotent semirings; quantales, allegories, and dynamic algebras; cylindric algebras, and about their application in areas such as verification, analysis and development of programs and algorithms, algebraic approaches to logics of programs, modal and dynamic logics, interval and temporal logics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Data Privacy Management, DPM 2016 and the 5th International Workshop on Quantitative Aspects in Security Assurance, QASA 2016, held in Heraklion, Crete, Greece, in September 2016. 9 full papers and 4 short papers out of 24 submissions are included in the DPM 2016 Workshop. They are organized around areas related to the management of privacy-sensitive informations, such as translation of high-level business goals into system-level privacy policies; administration of sensitive identifiers; data integration and privacy engineering. The QASA workshop centeres around research topics with a particular emphasis on the techniques for service oriented architectures, including aspects of dependability, privacy, risk and trust. Three full papers and one short papers out of 8 submissions are included in QASA 2016.

This Festschrift volume has been published to celebrate the lifelong scientific achievements of Farhad Arbab on the occasion of his retirement from the Centre of Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI). Over the years Farhad Arbab has sucessfully been engaged in scientific explorations in various directions: Software Composition, Service Oriented Computing, Component-based Software, Concurrency Theory, Coordination Models and Languages, Parallel and Distributed Computing, Visual Programming Environments, Constraints, Logic and Object-Oriented Programming. Farhad Arbab has shaped the field of Coordination Models and Languages. His insight that it is all about exeogeneous coordination gave rise to the striking elegance and beauty of Reo: an exogenous coordination model based on a formal calculus of channel composition. Reo has been extremely successful and is having a great impact in many of the areas mentioned above. The present volume collects a number of papers by several of Farhad’s close collaborators over the years.