The study of planetary or solar magnetic fields explains natural magnetism as a phenomenon of magnetohydrodynamics. The kinematic dynamo theory, especially the fast dynamo treated in this volume, is somewhat simpler but still it presents formidable analytical problems related to chaotic dynamics, for example. This remarkable book presents the status of the theory, including techniques of numerical simulations and modelling, along with a summary of results to date. The first three chapters introduce the problem and present examples of fast dynamo action in flows and maps. The remaining nine chapters deal with various analytical approaches and model systems. The book addresses astronomers and geophysicists, researchers and students alike.

This Festschrift was published in honor of Hans L. Bodlaender on the occasion of his 60th birthday. The 14 full and 5 short contributions included in this volume show the many transformative discoveries made by H.L. Bodlaender in the areas of graph algorithms, parameterized complexity, kernelization and combinatorial games. The papers are written by his former Ph.D. students and colleagues as well as by his former Ph.D. advisor, Jan van Leeuwen. Chapter “Crossing Paths with Hans Bodlaender: A Personal View on Cross-Composition for Sparsification Lower Bounds” is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book, Advanced Tools and Methods for Treewidth-Based Problem Solving, contains selected results from the author’s PhD studies, which were carried out from 2015 to 2021. For his PhD thesis, Markus Hecher received the EurAI Dissertation Award 2021 and the GI Dissertation Award 2021, amongst others. The aim of the book is to present a new toolkit for using the structural parameter of treewidth to solve problems in knowledge representation and reasoning (KR) and artificial intelligence (AI), thereby establishing both theoretical upper and lower bounds, as well as methods to deal with treewidth efficiently in practice. The key foundations outlined in the book provide runtime lower bounds – under reasonable assumptions in computational complexity – for evaluating quantified Boolean formulas and logic programs which match the known upper bounds already published in 2004 and 2009. The general nature of the developed tools and techniques means that a wide applicability beyond the selected problems and formalisms tackled in the book is anticipated, and it is hoped that the book will serve as a starting point for future theoretical and practical investigations, which will no doubt establish further results and gain deeper insights.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation, ISAAC 2006, held in Kolkata, India, December 2006. The 73 revised full papers cover algorithms and data structures, online algorithms, approximation algorithm, computational geometry, computational complexity, optimization and biology, combinatorial optimization and quantum computing, as well as distributed computing and cryptography.

This comprehensive textbook presents a clean and coherent account of most fundamental tools and techniques in Parameterized Algorithms and is a self-contained guide to the area. The book covers many of the recent developments of the field, including application of important separators, branching based on linear programming, Cut & Count to obtain faster algorithms on tree decompositions, algorithms based on representative families of matroids, and use of the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis. A number of older results are revisited and explained in a modern and didactic way. The book provides a toolbox of algorithmic techniques. Part I is an overview of basic techniques, each chapter discussing a certain algorithmic paradigm. The material covered in this part can be used for an introductory course on fixed-parameter tractability. Part II discusses more advanced and specialized algorithmic ideas, bringing the reader to the cutting edge of current research. Part III presents complexity results and lower bounds, giving negative evidence by way of W[1]-hardness, the Exponential Time Hypothesis, and kernelization lower bounds. All the results and concepts are introduced at a level accessible to graduate students and advanced undergraduate students. Every chapter is accompanied by exercises, many with hints, while the bibliographic notes point to original publications and related work.

This book is a thorough introduction to the formal foundations and practical applications of Bayesian networks. It provides an extensive discussion of techniques for building Bayesian networks that model real-world situations, including techniques for synthesizing models from design, learning models from data, and debugging models using sensitivity analysis. It also treats exact and approximate inference algorithms at both theoretical and practical levels. The treatment of exact algorithms covers the main inference paradigms based on elimination and conditioning and includes advanced methods for compiling Bayesian networks, time-space tradeoffs, and exploiting local structure of massively connected networks. The treatment of approximate algorithms covers the main inference paradigms based on sampling and optimization and includes influential algorithms such as importance sampling, MCMC, and belief propagation. The author assumes very little background on the covered subjects, supplying in-depth discussions for theoretically inclined readers and enough practical details to provide an algorithmic cookbook for the system developer.

Preprocessing, or data reduction, is a standard technique for simplifying and speeding up computation. Written by a team of experts in the field, this book introduces a rapidly developing area of preprocessing analysis known as kernelization. The authors provide an overview of basic methods and important results, with accessible explanations of the most recent advances in the area, such as meta-kernelization, representative sets, polynomial lower bounds, and lossy kernelization. The text is divided into four parts, which cover the different theoretical aspects of the area: upper bounds, meta-theorems, lower bounds, and beyond kernelization. The methods are demonstrated through extensive examples using a single data set. Written to be self-contained, the book only requires a basic background in algorithmics and will be of use to professionals, researchers and graduate students in theoretical computer science, optimization, combinatorics, and related fields.

This volume is the proceedings of the first International Workshop on Orders, Algorithms, and Applications, held at Lyon, France in July 1994. Ordered sets and the more specifically algorithmic aspects of order theory are of increasing importance, for example in graph theory. They enjoy a recognized place in computer science as well as in mathematics, due to various new developments in the last few years. The nine technical papers accepted for this volume and the four invited papers presented offer a representative perspective on theoretical and applicational aspects of orders and related algorithms.

This volume contains the proceedings of the 19th International Symposium on Algorithmsand Computation (ISAAC 2008),held on the Gold Coast, Australia, December 15–17, 2008. In the past, it was held in Tokyo (1990), Taipei (1991), Nagoya (1992), Hong Kong (1993), Beijing (1994), Cairns (1995), Osaka (1996), Singapore (1997), Daejeon (1998), Chennai (1999), Taipei (2000), Christchurch (2001), Vancouver (2002), Kyoto (2003), Hong Kong (2004), Hainan (2005), Kolkata (2006), and Sendai (2007). ISAACis anannualinternationalsymposiumthatcoversthe verywide range of topics in the ?eld of algorithms and computation. The main purpose of the symposium is to provide a forum for researchers working in algorithms and theoryofcomputationfrom allovertheworld.In responseto ourcallfor papers, we received 229 submissions from 40 countries. The task of selecting the papers in this volume was done by our Program Committee and many other external reviewers. After an extremely rigorous review process and extensive discussion, the Committee selected 78 papers. We hope all accepted papers will eventually appear in scienti?c journals in a more polished form. Two special issues, one of Algorithmica and one of the International Journal on Computational Geometry and Applications, with selected papers from ISAAC 2008 are in preparation.