The foreword, by David Rappaport and Kai Salomaa, is a very nice summary (five pages) of significant contributions made by Selim G. Akl in several areas of informatics during the course of a very productive career. (For the sake of transparency: I was a coauthor with him at one point in the early part of that career.) As the foreword shows, his body of work has addressed issues in parallel computation, parallel algorithms, unconventional computation, natural computation, computational geometry, and cryptography.

The body of the book is a set of 26 papers that also demonstrate a diversity of interests among Akl (who contributes as a coauthor to three of the papers), his students, his collaborators, his friends, and other researchers who contributed. The papers are largely standalone contributions, although there are some ideas that weave their way into more than one, such as universal computation (denied in a couple of different ways) and parallel computations of various kinds. Emergence involves relatively simple structures or processes collaborating to produce results that are perhaps unexpected, and certainly achievable without combining the elements into a larger whole. Emergence is a theme of the series of which this volume is a part, is included in the title of the volume, and is explicitly evident in most of the papers. For example, collections of context-free grammars are more expressive than the components on their own, and simple automata in large networks can produce surprising results. Other papers explore ideas without mathematical formalism, such as a paper on vehicular clouds that explores the shared use of the computing power in vehicles for purposes other than the immediate needs of the drivers. There are also a couple of papers showing the value of search algorithms for “games” such as physical maze solving and chess endgames with pawns.

The breadth of ideas makes this volume interesting reading for those who want an understanding of some of the diverse topics it covers, while the specific contributions will be of interest to specialists in the relevant areas. The complete table of contents can be found online (http://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319463759).

The papers vary considerably in style--some are heavily mathematical, others more conceptual--and cover a wide range of topics. It is unfortunate that such a volume would appear without more attention to the details of editing and proofreading. For example, one paper opens with Akl being recognized for his many contributions in the abstract and ends with him being listed in the references as “Selim, G. A.”