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Rainbow of computer science : dedicated to Hermann Maurer on the occasion of his 70th birthday (LNCS 6570)
Calude C., Rozenberg G., Salomaa A. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Germany,2011.Type:Divisible Book
Date Reviewed: Dec 5 2011

In the tradition of all Festschriften, this volume in tribute to Hermann Maurer collects short contributions on a variety of topics of particular relevance to the honoree. Given the diversity of Maurer’s published work, these topics range over many areas, which the editors have organized into sections about algorithms, formal languages and automata, learning, and the practice of informatics.

Some of the works gathered here--such as the paper by Böckenhauer, Hromkovič, and Mömke on parameterized optimization problems, or the paper on membrane computing and P and dP automata by Păun and Pérez-Jiménez--are surveys of previous work that bring together a number of related results in a format suitable for a broader audience.

Others present new results or attempt to unify known results in a more comprehensive setting. The piece by Ésik and Kuich, for instance, provides a unifying structure in which two Kleene-type theorems can be viewed as special cases of a more general one.

Several entries in this collection refer directly or indirectly to some of Maurer’s earlier work. For instance, Sauer examines the general coloring problem, applying properties of Heyting algebras to a number of results by Maurer and others on graphs and languages. The theme of the paper by Havemann and Fellner on the generative modeling language is suggestive of Maurer’s publications in the area of grammars and picture languages.

The papers are not all purely theoretical. Applications abound, as in Albert and Tischler’s paper showing the relevance of weighted finite automata to representing Fraktur and other families of ancient fonts. Van Leeuwen and Wiedermann propose a dynamic mobile network name-resolution protocol in their contribution, while Mohamed and Ottman outline a polyline simplification and smoothing algorithm for more faithfully rendering handwritten text received from a pen tablet.

Not all of the papers are technical. Gruska’s contribution is a plea for a broader and more comprehensive view of what he terms the “new informatics.” Maurer himself makes an appearance in this volume as co-author (with N. Kulathuramaiyer) of a paper on the challenges facing e-learning.

The examples cited are intended merely to highlight the diversity of topics and approaches in this volume. Ten more papers are included in the book on subjects as varied as covering and packing Rn by spheres, trans-disciplinary collaboration, the Austrian eGovernment architecture, categories of uncertainty, image stitching of range data, classifying varieties of domain-specific software, Europe’s ARIADNE infrastructure for sharing learning resources, properties of infinite words with certain local properties, primality of formal languages under various decomposition operators, and counting plane graphs. Nearly every practitioner of computer science or informatics will find something interesting in this volume.

Reviewer:  R. Roos Review #: CR139643 (1205-0472)
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