This volume presents the lecture notes from the authors' three summer courses offered during the program "Automorphisms of Free Groups: Geometry, Topology, and Dynamics," held at the Centre de Recerca Matematica (CRM) in Bellaterra, Spain. The first two chapters present the basic tools needed, from formal language theory (regular and context-free languages, automata, rewriting systems, transducers, etc) and emphasize their connections to group theory, mostly relating to free and virtually-free groups. The material covered is sufficient to present full proofs of many of the existing interesting characterizations of virtually-free groups. In turn, the last chapter comprehensively describes Bonahon's construction of Thurston's compactification of Teichmuller space in terms of geodesic currents on surfaces. It also includes several intriguing extensions of the notion of geodesic current to various other, more general settings.

This volume features seventeen extended conference abstracts corresponding to selected talks given by participants at the CRM research program "Automorphisms of Free Groups: Algorithms, Geometry and Dynamics", which took place at the Centre de Recerca Matematica in Barcelona in fall 2012. Most of them are short articles giving preliminary presentations of new results not yet published in regular research journals. The articles are the result from a direct collaboration among active researchers in the area after working in a dynamic and productive atmosphere. The book is intended for established researchers in the area of Group Theory, as well as for PhD and postdoc students who wish to learn more about the latest advances in this active area of research.