This volume consists of papers selected from the presentations at the workshop and includes mainly recent developments in the fields of formal languages, automata theory and algebraic systems related to the theoretical computer science and informatics. It covers the areas such as automata and grammars, languages and codes, combinatorics on words, cryptosystems, logics and trees, Grobner bases, minimal clones, zero-divisor graphs, fine convergence of functions, and others.

Japan has developed what is arguably the most sophisticated and the most democratic broadcasting system in the world. The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1st September 1923, with its devastation and confusion drove home in its appalling way the importance of being able to broadcast immediate information to the public. The same year, the Ministry of Communications promptly established an administrative system to regulate broadcasting. In less than a decade over one million people were registered listeners. Under the post war Constitution of 1946 freedom of "speech and all other forms of expression" was guaranteed, and the subsequent Broadcast Law instituted a dual system of broadcasting with the public service Nippon Hoso Kyokai (NHK) on the one hand, and commercial and private broadcasting organizations on the other. In 1978 there were ninety-one television broadcasting organizations and fifty-one radio broadcasting organizations. In this informative study, Professor Ito and his team comprehensively describe the staggering growth of broadcasting in Japan from the dawn or radio and television to satellite communication and through to the multiplex broadcasting of the future.

Japan has developed what is arguably the most sophisticated and the most democratic broadcasting system in the world. The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1st September 1923, with its devastation and confusion drove home in its appalling way the importance of being able to broadcast immediate information to the public. The same year, the Ministry of Communications promptly established an administrative system to regulate broadcasting. In less than a decade over one million people were registered listeners. Under the post war Constitution of 1946 freedom of "speech and all other forms of expression" was guaranteed, and the subsequent Broadcast Law instituted a dual system of broadcasting with the public service Nippon Hoso Kyokai (NHK) on the one hand, and commercial and private broadcasting organizations on the other. In 1978 there were ninety-one television broadcasting organizations and fifty-one radio broadcasting organizations. In this informative study, Professor Ito and his team comprehensively describe the staggering growth of broadcasting in Japan from the dawn or radio and television to satellite communication and through to the multiplex broadcasting of the future.

Although there are some books dealing with algebraic theory of automata, their contents consist mainly of Krohn-Rhodes theory and related topics. The topics in the present book are rather different. For example, automorphism groups of automata and the partially ordered sets of automata are systematically discussed. Moreover, some operations on languages and special classes of regular languages associated with deterministic and nondeterministic directable automata are dealt with. The book is self-contained and hence does not require any knowledge of automata and formal languages.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Developments in Language Theory, DLT 2008, held in Kyoto, Japan, September 2008.

The 36 revised full papers presented together with 6 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 102 submissions. All important issues in language theory are addressed including grammars, acceptors and transducers for words, trees and graphs; algebraic theories of automata; algorithmic, combinatorial and algebraic properties of words and languages; variable length codes; symbolic dynamics; cellular automata; polyominoes and multidimensional patterns; decidability questions; image manipulation and compression; efficient text algorithms; relationships to cryptography, concurrency, complexity theory and logic; bio-inspired computing; quantum computing.

The refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Developments in Language Theory, DLT 2002, held in Kyoto, Japan in September 2002. The 28 revised full papers presented together with 8 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 63 submissions. Among the topics addressed are grammars and acceptors for strings, graphs, arrays, etc; efficient algorithms for languages; combinatorial and algebraic properties of languages; decision problems; relations to complexity theory, logic picture description and analysis, DNA computing, cryptography, concurrency, quantum computing, and algebraic systems.

A word is said to be primitive if it cannot be represented as any power of another word. It is a well-known conjecture that the set of all primitive words Q over a non-trivial alphabet is not context-free: this conjecture is still open. In this book, the authors deal with properties of primitive words over a non-primitive alphabet, the language consisting of all primitive words and related languages. Moreover, some decidable and undecidable problems with respect to the above languages are discussed as well. As another try, a search for a non-phrase structure grammar which generates Q is performed.