This advanced textbook presents a broad and up-to-date view of the computational complexity theory of Boolean circuits. It combines the algorithmic and the computability-based approach, and includes extensive discussion of the literature to facilitate further study.It begins with efficient Boolean circuits for problems with high practical relevance, e.g., arithmetic operations, sorting, and transitive closure, then compares the computational model of Boolean circuits with other models such as Turing machines and parallel machines. Examination of the complexity of specific problems leads to the definition of complexity classes. The theory of circuit complexity classes is then thoroughly developed, including the theory of lower bounds and advanced topics such as connections to algebraic structures and to finite model theory.

In this volume, different aspects of logics for dependence and independence are discussed, including both the logical and computational aspects of dependence logic, and also applications in a number of areas, such as statistics, social choice theory, databases, and computer security. The contributing authors represent leading experts in this relatively new field, each of whom was invited to write a chapter based on talks given at seminars held at the Schloss Dagstuhl Leibniz Center for Informatics in Wadern, Germany (in February 2013 and June 2015) and an Academy Colloquium at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (March 2014). Altogether, these chapters provide the most up-to-date look at this developing and highly interdisciplinary field and will be of interest to a broad group of logicians, mathematicians, statisticians, philosophers, and scientists. Topics covered include a comprehensive survey of many propositional, modal, and first-order variants of dependence logic; new results concerning expressive power of several variants of dependence logic with different sets of logical connectives and generalized dependence atoms; connections between inclusion logic and the least-fixed point logic; an overview of dependencies in databases by addressing the relationships between implication problems for fragments of statistical conditional independencies, embedded multivalued dependencies, and propositional logic; various Markovian models used to characterize dependencies and causality among variables in multivariate systems; applications of dependence logic in social choice theory; and an introduction to the theory of secret sharing, pointing out connections to dependence and independence logic.