GeometricModelingandProcessing(GMP)isabiennialinternationalconference on geometric modeling, simulation and computing, which provides researchers and practitioners with a forum for exchanging new ideas, discussing new app- cations, and presenting new solutions. Previous GMP conferences were held in Pittsburgh (2006), Beijing (2004), Tokyo (2002), and Hong Kong (2000). This, the 5th GMP conference, was held in Hangzhou, one of the most beautiful cities in China. GMP 2008 received 113 paper submissions, covering a wide spectrum of - ometric modeling and processing, such as curves and surfaces, digital geometry processing, geometric feature modeling and recognition, geometric constraint solving, geometric optimization, multiresolution modeling, and applications in computer vision, image processing, scienti?c visualization, robotics and reverse engineering. Each paper was reviewed by at least three members of the program committee andexternalreviewers.Basedonthe recommendations ofthe revi- ers, 34 regular papers were selected for oral presentation, and 17 short papers were selected for poster presentation. All selected papers are included in these proceedings. We thank all authors, external reviewers and program committee members for their great e?ort and contributions, which made this conference a success.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference On Smart Homes and and Health Telematics, ICOST 2009, held in Tours, France, in July 2009. The 27 revised full papers and 20 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on cognitive assistance and chronic diseases management; ambient living systems; service continuity and context awareness; user modeling and human-machine interaction; ambient intelligence modeling and privacy issues, human behavior and activities monitoring.

ICIAR 2009, the International Conference on Image Analysis and Recognition, held in Halifax, Canada July 6-8, 2009, was the sixth in the ICIAR series of - nual conferences alternating between Europe and North America. ICIAR 2004 was held in Porto, Portugal, ICIAR 2005 in Toronto, Canada, ICIAR 2006 in P ovoa do Varzim, Portugal, ICIAR 2007 in Montreal, Canada, and ICIAR 2008 in Pov oa do Varzim, Portugal. The idea of o?ering these conferences came as a result of discussion between researchers in Portugal and Canada to enco- age collaboration and exchange, mainly between these two countries, but also with the open participationof other countries, addressing recent advances in the theory, methodology and applications of image analysis and recognition. For ICIAR 2009, wereceiveda total of 164full papersfrom 34 countries. The review process was carried out by the Program Committee members and other reviewers; all are experts in various image analysis and recognition areas. Each paper wasreviewedbyatleasttwo reviewers, andalsocheckedbythe conference Co-chairs. In all, 93 papers were ?nally accepted (45 oral presentations, and 48 posters) and appear in these proceedings. This year, di?erent from previous years, we opted for single sessions rather than parallel sessions to encourage participation in all sessions. The high quality of the papers is attributed ?rst to theauthors, andsecondtothequalityofthereviewsprovidedbytheexperts. We would like to thank the authors for responding to our call for papers, some are returningauthorswhoattendedpreviouseditionsofthe conferenceandsomeare new. We would like to sincerely thank the reviewers for their careful evaluation andtheexcellentfeedbacktheyprovidedtothe authors."

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th European Conference on Genetic Programming, EuroGP 2009, held in Tubingen, Germany, in April 2009 colocated with the Evo* 2009 events.

The 21 revised plenary papers and 9 revised poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 57 submissions. A great variety of topics are presented reflecting the current state of research in the field of genetic programming, including the latest work on representations, theory, operators and analysis, feature selection, generalisation, coevolution and numerous applications.

Attention has represented a core scienti?c topic in the design of AI-enabled systems in the last few decades. Today, in the ongoing debate, design, and c- putationalmodelingofarti?cialcognitivesystems, attentionhasgainedacentral position as a focus of research. For instance, attentional methods are considered in investigating the interfacing of sensory and cognitive information processing, for the organization of behaviors, and for the understanding of individual and social cognition in infant development. Whilevisualcognitionplaysacentralroleinhumanperception, ?ndingsfrom neuroscience and experimental psychology have provided strong evidence about the perception-action nature of cognition. The embodied nature of senso- motor intelligence requires a continuous and focused interplay between the c- trolofmotoractivitiesandtheinterpretationoffeedbackfromperceptualmod- ities. Decision making about the selection of information from the incoming sensory stream - in tune with contextual processing on a current task and an agent's global objectives - becomes a further challenging issue in attentional control. Attention must operate at interfaces between a bottom-up-driven world interpretationandtop-down-driveninformationselection, thusactingatthecore of arti?cial cognitive systems. These insights have already induced changes in AI-related disciplines, such as the design of behavior-based robot control and the computational modeling of animats. Today, the development of enabling technologiessuch as autonomous robotic systems, miniaturizedmobile-evenwearable-sensors, andambientintelligence systems involves the real-time analysis of enormous quantities of data. These data have to be processed in an intelligent way to provide "on time delivery" of the required relevant information. Knowledge has to be applied about what needs to be attended to, and when, and what to do in a meaningful sequence, in correspondence with visual feedback.

This book contains the best papers of the Second International Conference on So- ware and Data Technologies (ICSOFT 2007), held in Barcelona, Spain. It was org- ized by the Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Communication and Control (INSTICC), co-sponsored by the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC), in cooperation with the Interdisciplinary Institute for Collaboration and Research on Enterprise Systems and Technology (IICREST). The purpose of ICSOFT 2007 was to bring together researchers and practitioners int- ested in information technology and software development. The conference tracks were "Software Engineering," "Information Systems and Data Management," "Programming Languages," "Distributed and Parallel Systems" and "Knowledge Engineering." Being crucial for the development of information systems, software and data te- nologies encompass a large number of research topics and applications: from imp- mentation-related issues to more abstract theoretical aspects of software engineering; from databases and data warehouses to management information systems and kno- edge-base systems; next to that, distributed systems, pervasive computing, data quality and other related topics are included in the scope of this conference.

This volume brings together the peer-reviewed contributions of the participants at the COST 2102 and euCognition International Training School on "Multimodal Signals: C- nitive and Algorithmic Issues" held in Vietri sul Mare, Salerno, Italy, April 22 -26, 2008. The school was sponsored by COST (European Cooperation in the Field of Scientific and Technical Research, www.cost.esf.org) in the domain of Information and Communi- tion Technologies (ICT) for disseminating the advances of the research activities developed within Action 2102: "Cross-Modal Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication" (www.cost.esf.org/domains_actions/ict/Actions/Verbal_and_Non- verbal _Communication) and by euCognition: The European Network for Advancement of Artificial Cognitive Systems (www.euCognition.org). COST Action 2102, in its second year of life, brought together about 60 European and 6 overseas scientific laboratories whose aim is to develop interactive dialogue systems and intelligent virtual avatars graphically embodied in a 2D and/or 3D int- active virtual world, able to interact intelligently with the environment, other avatars, and particularly with human users. The main theme of the school was to investigate the mathematical and psycholo- cal tools for modelling human-machine interaction through access to a graded series of tasks for measuring the amount of adjustment (as well as intelligence and achie- ment) needed for introducing new concepts in the information communication te- nology domain in order to develop adaptive, socially enabled and human-centered automatic systems able to serve remote applications in medicine, learning, care, re- bilitation, and for accessibility to work, employment, and information.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Evolutionary Computation, Machine Learning and Data Mining in Bioinformatics, EvoBIO 2009, held in Tubingen, Germany, in April 2009 colocated with the Evo* 2009 events.

The 17 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 44 submissions. EvoBio is the premiere European event for experts in computer science meeting with experts in bioinformatics and the biological sciences, all interested in the interface between evolutionary computation, machine learning, data mining, bioinformatics, and computational biology. Topics addressed by the papers include biomarker discovery, cell simulation and modeling, ecological modeling, uxomics, gene networks, biotechnology, metabolomics, microarray analysis, phylogenetics, protein interactions, proteomics, sequence analysis and alignment, as well as systems biology.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Advanced Concepts for Intelligent Vision Systems, ACIVS 2008, held in Juan-les-Pins, France, in October 2008.

The 33 revised full papers and 69 posters presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 179 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on image and video coding; systems and applications; video processing; filtering and restoration; segmentation and feature extraction; tracking, scene understanding and computer vision; medical imaging; and biometrics and surveillance.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the joint International Conference APWeb/WAIM 2009 which was held in Suzhou, China, during April 1-4, 2009.

The 42 full papers presented together with 26 short papers and the abstracts of 2 keynote speeches were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The topics covered are query processing, topic-based techniques, Web data processing, multidimensional data analysis, stream data processing, data mining and its applications, and data management support to advanced applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recognition, CIARP 2007, held in Valparaiso, Chile, November 13-16, 2007.

The 97 revised full papers presented together with 4 keynote articles were carefully reviewed and selected from 200 submissions. The papers cover ongoing research and mathematical methods for pattern recognition, image analysis, and applications in such diverse areas as computer vision, robotics and remote sensing, industry, health, space exploration, data mining, document analysis, natural language processing and speech recognition.

The 4th International Workshop on Medical Imaging and Augmented Reality, MIAR 2008, was held at the University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan during August 1-2, 2008. The goal of MIAR 2008 was to bring together researchersin medical imaging and intervention to present state-of-the-art developments in this ever-growing research area. Rapid technical advances in medical imaging, including its gr- ing application in drug/gene therapy and invasive/interventional procedures, have attracted signi?cant interest in the close integration of research in the life sciences, medicine, physical sciences, and engineering. Current research is also motivated by the fact that medical imaging is moving increasingly from a p- marily diagnostic modality towards a therapeutic and interventional aid, driven by the streamlining of diagnostic and therapeutic processes for human diseases by means of imaging modalities and robotic-assisted surgery. The impact of MIAR on these ?elds increases each year, and the quality of submitted papers this yearwas veryimpressive. We received90 full submissions, which were subsequently reviewed by up to ?ve reviewers. Reviewer a?liations were carefully checked against author a?liations to avoid con?icts of interest, and the review process was run as a double-blind process. A special procedure was also devised for papers from the universities of the organizers, upholding a double-blind review process for these papers. The MIAR 2008 Program C- mittee ?nally accepted 44 full papers. For this workshop, we also included three papers from the invited speakers coveringregistration and segmentation, virtual reality, and perceptual docking for robotic control.

The chapters in this volume were presented at the July-August 2008 NATO Advanced Study Institute on Unexploded Ordnance Detection and Mitigation. The conference was held at the beautiful Il Ciocco resort near Lucca, in the glorious Tuscany region of northern Italy. For the ninth time we gathered at this idyllic spot to explore and extend the reciprocity between mathematics and engineering. The dynamic interaction between world-renowned scientists from the usually disparate communities of pure mathematicians and applied scientists which occurred at our eight previous ASI's continued at this meeting. The detection and neutralization of unexploded ordnance (UXO) has been of major concern for very many decades; at least since the First World war. UXO continues to be the subject of intensive research in many ?elds of science, incl- ing mathematics, signal processing (mainly radar and sonar) and chemistry. While today's headlines emphasize the mayhem resulting from the placement of imp- vised explosive devices (IEDs), humanitarian landmine clearing continues to draw signi?cant global attention as well. In many countries of the world, landmines threaten the population and hinder reconstruction and fast, ef?cient utilization of large areas of the mined land in the aftermath of military con?icts.

A key driving factor for biometrics is the widespread national and international depl- ment of biometric systems that has been initiated in the past two years and is about to accelerate. While nearly all current biometric deployments are government-led and pr- cipally concerned with national security and border control scenarios, it is now apparent that the widespread availability of biometrics in everyday life will also spin out an ev- increasing number of (private) applications in other domains. Crucial to this vision is the management of the user's identity, which does not only imply the creation and update of a biometric template, but requires the development of instruments to properly handle all the data and operations related to the user identity. COST Action 2101 on Biometrics for Identity Documents and Smart Cards has - erated as a valuable and effective platform for close collaboration of European sci- tists from academia and industry researching biometrics for identity documents and smartcards. This has led to the continuous advances achieved in various classes of biometrics and their implementations in the identity management domain. These c- tributions to knowledge in this field were first presented at the First European Wo- shop on Biometrics and Identity Management (BioID 2008) organized in Roskilde, Denmark during May 7-9, 2008.

Welcome to the 2008EuropeanConference onComputer Vision. These proce- ings are the result of a great deal of hard work by many people. To produce them, a total of 871 papers were reviewed. Forty were selected for oral pres- tation and 203 were selected for poster presentation, yielding acceptance rates of 4.6% for oral, 23.3% for poster, and 27.9% in total. Weappliedthreeprinciples.First, sincewehadastronggroupofAreaChairs, the ?nal decisions to accept or reject a paper rested with the Area Chair, who wouldbeinformedbyreviewsandcouldactonlyinconsensuswithanotherArea Chair. Second, we felt that authors were entitled to a summary that explained how the Area Chair reached a decision for a paper. Third, we were very careful to avoid con?icts of interest. Each paper was assigned to an Area Chair by the Program Chairs, and each Area Chair received a pool of about 25 papers. The Area Chairs then identi?ed and rankedappropriatereviewersfor eachpaper in their pool, and a constrained optimization allocated three reviewers to each paper. We are very proud that every paper received at least three reviews. At this point, authors were able to respond to reviews. The Area Chairs then needed to reach a decision. We used a series of procedures to ensure careful review and to avoid con?icts of interest. ProgramChairs did not submit papers. The Area Chairs were divided into three groups so that no Area Chair in the group was in con?ict with any paper assigned to any Area Chair in the group

Welcome to the 2008EuropeanConference onComputer Vision. These proce- ings are the result of a great deal of hard work by many people. To produce them, a total of 871 papers were reviewed. Forty were selected for oral pres- tation and 203 were selected for poster presentation, yielding acceptance rates of 4.6% for oral, 23.3% for poster, and 27.9% in total. Weappliedthreeprinciples.First, sincewehadastronggroupofAreaChairs, the ?nal decisions to accept or reject a paper rested with the Area Chair, who wouldbeinformedbyreviewsandcouldactonlyinconsensuswithanotherArea Chair. Second, we felt that authors were entitled to a summary that explained how the Area Chair reached a decision for a paper. Third, we were very careful to avoid con?icts of interest. Each paper was assigned to an Area Chair by the Program Chairs, and each Area Chair received a pool of about 25 papers. The Area Chairs then identi?ed and rankedappropriatereviewersfor eachpaper in their pool, and a constrained optimization allocated three reviewers to each paper. We are very proud that every paper received at least three reviews. At this point, authors were able to respond to reviews. The Area Chairs then needed to reach a decision. We used a series of procedures to ensure careful review and to avoid con?icts of interest. ProgramChairs did not submit papers. The Area Chairs were divided into three groups so that no Area Chair in the group was in con?ict with any paper assigned to any Area Chair in the group

Welcome to the 2008EuropeanConference onComputer Vision. These proce- ings are the result of a great deal of hard work by many people. To produce them, a total of 871 papers were reviewed. Forty were selected for oral pres- tation and 203 were selected for poster presentation, yielding acceptance rates of 4.6% for oral, 23.3% for poster, and 27.9% in total. Weappliedthreeprinciples.First, sincewehadastronggroupofAreaChairs, the ?nal decisions to accept or reject a paper rested with the Area Chair, who wouldbeinformedbyreviewsandcouldactonlyinconsensuswithanotherArea Chair. Second, we felt that authors were entitled to a summary that explained how the Area Chair reached a decision for a paper. Third, we were very careful to avoid con?icts of interest. Each paper was assigned to an Area Chair by the Program Chairs, and each Area Chair received a pool of about 25 papers. The Area Chairs then identi?ed and rankedappropriatereviewersfor eachpaper in their pool, and a constrained optimization allocated three reviewers to each paper. We are very proud that every paper received at least three reviews. At this point, authors were able to respond to reviews. The Area Chairs then needed to reach a decision. We used a series of procedures to ensure careful review and to avoid con?icts of interest. ProgramChairs did not submit papers. The Area Chairs were divided into three groups so that no Area Chair in the group was in con?ict with any paper assigned to any Area Chair in the group

This book contains refereed and improved papers presented at the Seventh IAPR Workshop on Graphics Recognition (GREC2007), held in Curitiba, Brazil, September 20-21, 2007. The GREC workshops provide an excellent opportunity for researchers and practitioners at all levels of experience to meet colleagues and to share new ideas and knowledge about graphics recognition methods. Graphics recognition is a subfield of document image analysis that deals with graphical entities in engineering drawings, sketches, maps, architectural plans, musical scores, mathematical notation, tables, diagrams, etc. GREC2007 continued the tradition of past workshops held at Penn State University, USA (GREC 1995, LNCS Volume 1072, Springer, 1996); Nancy, France (GREC 1997, LNCS Volume 1389, Springer, 1998); Jaipur, India (GREC 1999, LNCS Volume 1941, Springer, 2000); Kingston, Canada (GREC 2001, LNCS Volume 2390, Springer, 2002); Barcelona, Spain (GREC 2003, LNCS Volume 3088, Springer, 2004); and Hong Kong, China (GREC 2005, LNCS Volume 3926, Springer, 2006). GREC2007 was also the first edition of a GREC workshop held at the same location of the ICDAR conference and it facilitated people to attend to both events. The program of GREC2007 was organized in a single-track 2-day workshop. It comprised several sessions dedicated to specific topics.

Affect and emotion play an important role in our everyday lives: They are present whatever we do, wherever we are, and wherever we go, without us being aware of them for much of the time. When it comes to interaction, be it with humans, technology, or humans via technology, we suddenly become more aware of emotion, either by seeing the other's emotional expression, or by not getting an emotional response while anticipating one.

Given this, it seems only sensible to explore affect and emotion in human-computer interaction, to investigate the underlying principles, to study the role they play, to develop methods to quantify them, and to finally build applications that make use of them. This is the research field for which, over ten years ago, Rosalind Picard coined the phrase "affective computing."

The present book provides an account of the latest work on a variety of aspects related to affect and emotion in human-technology interaction. It covers theoretical issues, user experience and design aspects as well as sensing issues, and reports on a number of affective applications that have been developed in recent years.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Multiple Classifier Systems, MCS 2007, held in Prague, Czech Republic in May 2007.

The 49 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 80 initial submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on kernel-based fusion, applications, boosting, cluster and graph ensembles, feature subspace ensembles, multiple classifier system theory, intramodal and multimodal fusion of biometric experts, majority voting, and ensemble learning.

ICDM / MLDM Medaillie (limited edition) Meissner Porcellan, the "White Gold" of King August the Strongest of Saxonia ICDM 2008 was the eighth event of the Industrial Conference on Data Mining held in Leipzig (www.data-mining-forum.de). For this edition the Program Committee received 116 submissions from 20 countries. After the peer-review process, we accepted 36 high-quality papers for oral presentation, which are included in these proceedings. The topics range from aspects of classification and prediction, clustering, Web mining, data mining in medicine, applications of data mining, time series and frequent pattern mining, and association rule mining. Thirteen papers were selected for poster presentations that are published in the ICDM Poster Proceeding Volume. In conjunction with ICDM there were three workshops focusing on special hot application-oriented topics in data mining. The workshop Data Mining in Life Science DMLS 2008 was held the third time this year and the workshop Data Mining in Marketing DMM 2008 ran for the second time this year. Additionally, we introduced an International Workshop on Case-Based Reasoning for Multimedia Data CBR-MD.

This volume (5116) of Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science contains the th proceedings of the 9 International Workshop on Digital Mammography (IWDM) which was held July 20 - 23, 2008 in Tucson, AZ in the USA. The IWDM meetings traditionally bring together a diverse set of researchers (physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, engineers), clinicians (radiologists, surgeons) and representatives of industry, who are jointly committed to developing technologies to support clinicians in the early detection and subsequent patient management of breast cancer. The IWDM conference series was initiated at a 1993 meeting of the SPIE Medical Imaging Symposium in San Jose, CA, with subsequent meetings hosted every two years at sites around the world. Previous meetings were held in York, England; Chicago, IL USA; Nijmegen, Netherlands; Toronto, Canada; Bremen, Germany; Durham, NC USA and Manchester, UK. th The 9 IWDM meeting was attended by a very international group of participants, and during the two and one-half days of scientific sessions there were 70 oral presentations, 34 posters and 3 keynote addresses. The three keynote speakers discussed some of the "hot" topics in breast imaging today. Karen Lindfors spoke on "Dedicated Breast CT: Initial Clinical Experiences. " Elizabeth Rafferty asked the question is "Breast Tomosynthesis: Ready for Prime Time?" Finally, Martin Tornai discussed "3D Multi-Modality Molecular Breast Imaging.

TheThirdIAPRTC3WorkshoponArti?cialNeuralNetworksinPatternRec- nition, ANNPR 2008, was held at Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris (France), July 2-4, 2008. The workshop was organized by the Technical C- mittee on Neural Networks and Computational Intelligence (TC3) that is one of the 20 TCs of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR). The scope of TC3 includes computational intelligence approaches, such as fuzzy systems, evolutionary computing and arti?cial neural networks and their use in various pattern recognition applications. ANNPR 2008 followed the success of the previous workshops: ANNPR 2003 held at the University of Florence (Italy) andANPPR 2006held at ReisensburgCastle, Universityof Ulm (Germany).All the workshops featured a single-track program including both oral sessions and posters with a focus on active participation from every participant. Inrecentyears, the?eld ofneuralnetworkshasmaturedconsiderablyinboth methodologyandreal-worldapplications.Asre?ectedinthisbook, arti?cialn- ral networks in pattern recognition combine many ideas from machine learning, advanced statistics, signal and image processing for solving complex real-world pattern recognition problems. High quality across such a diverse ?eld of research can only be achieved through a rigorous and selective review process. For this workshop, 57 papers were submitted out of which 29 were selected for inclusion in the proceedings. The oral sessions included 18 papers, while 11 contributions were presented as posters. ANNPR 2008 featured research works in the areas of supervised and unsupervised learning, multiple classi?er systems, pattern recognition in signal and image processing, and feature selectio

This year, 2008, we had a very special Annual Symposium of the Deutsche Arbeitsgemeinschaft fur ] Mustererkennung (DAGM) in Munich, and there are several reasons for that. First ofall, this yearwasthe 30th anniversaryof the symposium. Thismeans that the ?rst symposium was organized in 1978 and the location of this event was: Munich Justtwoyearsbefore, in1976, theDAGMwasfoundedin: Munich And Munich was also the location of two further DAGM symposia, in 1991 and in 2001. When I attended the conference in 2001, I was in negotiations for my appointmentto the Chair ofHuman-MachineCommunicationatthe Technische Universit] atMunc ] hen(TUM)andcertainlyIdidnotatallanticipatethatIwould have the pleasure and honor to host this conference just seven years later again in Munich for its 30th anniversary. But special dates are not the only reason why DAGM was somewhat di?- ent this time. This year, DAGM was organized in conjunction with Automatica, the Third International Trade Fair for Automation in Assembly, Robotics, and Vision, one of the world's leading fairs in automation and robotics. This was an ideal platform for the exchange of ideas and people between the symposium and the fair, and the conference thus took place in a somewhat unusual but extra- dinary location, the International Congress Center (ICM), in the direct vicinity of the New Munich Trade Fair Center, the location of the Automatica fair. With free access to Automatica, the registrants of DAGM got the opportunity to make full use of all the synergy e?ects associated with this special arrangement."

The papers contained in this volume were presented at the 19th Annual S- posium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2008) held at the University of Pisa, Italy, June 18-20, 2008. All the papers presented at the conference are originalresearchcontributions on computational pattern matching and analysis. They were selected from 78 submissions. Each submission was reviewed by at least three reviewers. The committee decided to accept 25 papers. The programme also includes three invited talks by Daniel M. Gus?eld from the University of California, Davis, USA, J. Ian Munro from the University of Waterloo, Canada, and Prabhakar Raghavan from Yahoo! Research, USA. The objective of the annual CPM meetings is to provide an international forum for research in combinatorial pattern matching and related applications. It addresses issues of searching and matching strings and more complicated p- terns such as trees, regular expressions, graphs, point sets, and arrays. The goal is to derive non-trivialcombinatorialproperties of suchstructures and to exploit these properties in order to either achieve superior performance for the cor- sponding computational problems or pinpoint conditions under which searches cannotbeperformede?ciently. Themeeting also dealswith problems incom- tational biology, data compression, data mining, coding, information retrieval, natural language processing and pattern recognition.