This is the first text and monograph about DNA computing, a molecular approach that might revolutionize our thinking and ideas about computing. Although it is too soon to predict whether computer hardware to change from silicon to carbon and from microchips to DNA molecules, the theoretical premises have already been studied extensively. The book starts with an introduction to DNA-related matters, the basics of biochemistry and language and computation theory, and progresses to the most advanced mathematical theory developed so far in the area. All three authors are pioneers in the theory of DNA computing. Apart from being well-known scientists, they are known for their lucid writing. Many of their previous books have become classics in their field, and this book too is sure to follow their example.

This book represents the first attempt to analyze historical and cultural developments in late medieval and early modern southeastern Europe as a set of mutually intertwined regional histories, burdened by the strong dichotomy between the almighty center-Constantinople-and the periphery that is rarely visible in both contemporary sources and modern scholarship. This mosaic of original studies is devoted to various regions of the Byzantine Balkans and their historical, artistic, and ideological idiosyncrasies, mirroring the complex character and composite and fragmented structure of this vast region. The focal points of the book are the two captures of Constantinople in 1204 and 1453, and the contributors analyze the significance of these catastrophic events on the political destiny of medieval Balkan societies, the mechanisms of adapting to the new political order, and the ever-present interconnectedness of a lower, regional elite across southeastern Europe that had remained strong even after the Ottoman conquest.

Marcus Contextual Grammars is the first monograph to present a class of grammars introduced about three decades ago, based on the fundamental linguistic phenomenon of strings-contexts interplay (selection). Most of the theoretical results obtained so far about the many variants of contextual grammars are presented with emphasis on classes of questions with relevance for applications in the study of natural language syntax: generative powers, descriptive and computational complexity, automata recognition, semilinearity, structure of the generated strings, ambiguity, regulated rewriting, etc. Constant comparison with families of languages in the Chomsky hierarchy is made. Connections with non-linguistic areas are established, such as molecular computing. Audience: Researchers and students in theoretical computer science (formal language theory and automata theory), computational linguistics, mathematical methods in linguistics, and linguists interested in formal models of syntax.

Membrane computing is a branch of natural computing which investigates computing models abstracted from the structure and functioning of living cells and from their interactions in tissues or higher-order biological structures. The models considered, called membrane systems (P systems), are parallel, distributed computing models, processing multisets of symbols in cell-like compartmental architectures. In many applications membrane systems have considerable advantages among these are their inherently discrete nature, parallelism, transparency, scalability and nondeterminism.

In dedicated chapters, leading experts explain most of the applications of membrane computing reported so far, in biology, computer science, computer graphics and linguistics. The book also contains detailed reviews of the software tools used to simulate P systems.

Formal Languages and Applications provides a comprehensive study-aid and self-tutorial for graduates students and researchers. The main results and techniques are presented in an readily accessible manner and accompanied by many references and directions for further research. This carefully edited monograph is intended to be the gateway to formal language theory and its applications, so it is very useful as a review and reference source of information in formal language theory.

This book is a Spanish/English edition of Lope de Vega's La discreta enamorada. The core of the book consists of two texts: a critical edition of Lope's play in Spanish and Donald R. Larson's English translation/adaptation of that work. Common to the two texts are explanatory notes focusing on historical, cultural, and literary references. The Spanish text is further clarified by elucidations of difficult words or passages. The texts are preceded by a substantial introduction (discussing conventions of comedy, the comedia de capa y espada and its variation known as the comedia urbana, the political, social, and economic contexts of early 17th-century Madrid) and are followed by a critical apparatus that lists important variants that may be found in previous editions of Lope's play.

First published in 1975, A Constant Burden was a truly ground-breaking text in the field of medical sociology and has since become an undisputed classic. Over thirty years later this revised edition gives new life to this important work. It contains the same seminal study of families with a disabled child, based on an analysis of interviews with parents about the effects of their child's disability on their family life. Whereas much of the contemporary research assumed that the presence of such a child must constitute a problem, and attempted to read parents' responses as indicators of the family's psychological and social adjustment to this 'reality', Voysey Paun's analysis takes a radically different stance. She shows that what parents say should rather be understood as socially constructed accounts of 'normal parenting' which induce others to identify them as properly fulfilling their responsibilities as good parents. Voysey Paun's approach to the analysis and interpretation of interview responses has become a much more central theme for sociological research, instrumental in changing theories about the nature of disability and the family as expressed by sociologists, social workers and other agencies. The revised edition contains a new introduction which puts the study in its intellectual context. It will be essential reading in the sociology of health and illness, and will also be of interest to social workers and other professionals concerned with disability and family life.

This book addresses the tension between, on the one hand, anti-doping practices and measures and, on the other hand, the fundamental rights of athletes. New techniques for testing and re-testing samples taken several years ago, have caused a push by the World Anti-Doping Agency and affiliated organizations for stricter rules, more doping tests and higher sanctions. Meanwhile, many States are adopting new laws and regulations to facilitate this push. At the same time, privacy and data protection have gained new momentum, especially in the European Union, where the General Data Protection Regulation came into effect in May 2018. It contains new obligations for data controllers and processors, rights for data subjects and sanctions for those violating the data protection rules. It is clear that gathering whereabouts information on athletes, collecting urine and blood samples, analyzing the samples and using the data distilled there from falls within the scope of the data protection framework. In addition, European athletes can invoke their rights to privacy, fair trial and freedom from discrimination as guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights. The book is aimed at professionals and organizations involved in sports and anti-doping and provides them with an opportunity to delve into and understand the rights guaranteed to athletes within the European context. Furthermore, it is equally relevant for privacy and data protection lawyers and human rights scholars wishing to familiarize themselves with the difficult questions relating to human rights protection in the world of sport and anti-doping. Written in accessible language, it should also prove useful to athletes and laymen wanting to learn about the rules applicable to almost everyone who practices sport, even at a local amateur level. Bart van der Sloot is senior researcher at Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands, Mara Paun is PhD researcher at Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands, Ronald Leenes is professor at Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands.

First published in 1975, A Constant Burden was a truly ground-breaking text in the field of medical sociology and has since become an undisputed classic. Over thirty years later this revised edition gives new life to this important work. It contains the same seminal study of families with a disabled child, based on an analysis of interviews with parents about the effects of their child's disability on their family life. Whereas much of the contemporary research assumed that the presence of such a child must constitute a problem, and attempted to read parents' responses as indicators of the family's psychological and social adjustment to this 'reality', Voysey Paun's analysis takes a radically different stance. She shows that what parents say should rather be understood as socially constructed accounts of 'normal parenting' which induce others to identify them as properly fulfilling their responsibilities as good parents. Voysey Paun's approach to the analysis and interpretation of interview responses has become a much more central theme for sociological research, instrumental in changing theories about the nature of disability and the family as expressed by sociologists, social workers and other agencies. The revised edition contains a new introduction which puts the study in its intellectual context. It will be essential reading in the sociology of health and illness, and will also be of interest to social workers and other professionals concerned with disability and family life.

This book addresses the tension between, on the one hand, anti-doping practices and measures and, on the other hand, the fundamental rights of athletes. New techniques for testing and re-testing samples taken several years ago, have caused a push by the World Anti-Doping Agency and affiliated organizations for stricter rules, more doping tests and higher sanctions. Meanwhile, many States are adopting new laws and regulations to facilitate this push. At the same time, privacy and data protection have gained new momentum, especially in the European Union, where the General Data Protection Regulation came into effect in May 2018. It contains new obligations for data controllers and processors, rights for data subjects and sanctions for those violating the data protection rules. It is clear that gathering whereabouts information on athletes, collecting urine and blood samples, analyzing the samples and using the data distilled there from falls within the scope of the data protection framework. In addition, European athletes can invoke their rights to privacy, fair trial and freedom from discrimination as guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights. The book is aimed at professionals and organizations involved in sports and anti-doping and provides them with an opportunity to delve into and understand the rights guaranteed to athletes within the European context. Furthermore, it is equally relevant for privacy and data protection lawyers and human rights scholars wishing to familiarize themselves with the difficult questions relating to human rights protection in the world of sport and anti-doping. Written in accessible language, it should also prove useful to athletes and laymen wanting to learn about the rules applicable to almost everyone who practices sport, even at a local amateur level. Bart van der Sloot is senior researcher at Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands, Mara Paun is PhD researcher at Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands, Ronald Leenes is professor at Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands.

This book investigates two major systems: firstly, co-operating distributed grammar systems, where the grammars work on one common sequential form and the co-operation is realized by the control of the sequence of active grammars; secondly, parallel communicating grammar systems, where each grammar works on its own sequential form and co-operation is done by means of communicating between grammars. The investigation concerns hierarchies with respect to different variants of co-operation, relations with classical formal language theory, syntactic parameters such as the number of components and their size, power of synchronization, and general notions generated from artificial intelligence.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Bio-inspired Computing: Theories and Applications, BIC-TA 2014, held in Wuhan, China, in October 2014. The 109 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 204 submissions. The papers focus on four main topics, namely evolutionary computing, neural computing, DNA computing, and membrane computing.

Membrane computing is an unconventional model of computation associated with a new computing paradigm. The field of membrane computing was initiated in 1998 by the author of this book; it is a branch of natural computing inspired by the structure and functioning of the living cell and devises distributed parallel computing models in the form of membrane systems. This book is the first monograph surveying the new field in a systematic and coherent way. It presents the central notions and results: the main classes of P systems, the main results about their computational power and efficiency, a complete bibliography, and a series of open problems and research topics.

Formal Languages and Applications provides a comprehensive study-aid and self-tutorial for graduates students and researchers. The main results and techniques are presented in an readily accessible manner and accompanied by many references and directions for further research. This carefully edited monograph is intended to be the gateway to formal language theory and its applications, so it is very useful as a review and reference source of information in formal language theory.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Membrane Computing, CMC 2011, held in Fontainebleau, France, in August 2011. The 19 revised selected papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 27 papers and 5 posters presented at the conference. The book also contains full papers or extended abstracts of the 5 invited presentations. The papers address all the main directions of research in membrane computing, ranging from theoretical topics in the mathematics and computer science to application issues.

To our families The formal language theory was born in the middle of our century as a tool for modelling and investigating the syntax of natural languages, and it has been developed mainly in connection with programming language handling. Of course, one cannot deny the impulses from neuronal net investigations, from logic, as well as the mathematical motivation of the early researches. The theory has rapidly become a mature one, with specific problems, techniques and results and with an internal self-motivated life. Abstract enough to deal with the essence of modelled phenomena, formal language theory has been applied during the last years to many further non-linguistical fields, sometimes surprisingly far from the previous areas of applications; such fields are developmental biology, economic modelling, semiotics of folklore, dramatic and musical works, cryptography, sociology, psychology, and so on. All these applications as well as the traditional ones to natural and programming languages revealed a rather common conclusion: very frequently, context-free gram mars, the most developed and the most "tractable" type of Chomsky grammars, are not sufficient. "The world is non-context-free" (and we shall "prove" this statement in Section 0.4). On the other hand, the context-sensitive grammars are too powerful and definitely "intractable" (many problems are undecidable or are still open; there is no semantic interpretation of the nonterminals an so on). This is the reason to look for intermediate generative devices, conjoining the simpli city and the beauty of context-free grammars with the power of context-sensitive ones.

Dedicated to Arto Salomaa, a towering figure of theoretical computer science, on the occasion of his 65th birthday, this book is a tribute to him on behalf of the theoretical computer science community. The contributions are written by internationally recognized scientists and cover most of Salomaa's many research areas. Due to its representative selection of classic and cutting edge trends in theoretical computer science, the book constitutes a comprehensive state-of-the-art survey. The contributions are in such central areas as automata theory, algorithms and complexity, and combinatorics of words. But not only that, they take up new areas such as regular sets and biocomputing. While some are survey articles of fundamental topics, most are original research papers.

This is the first book on DNA computing, a molecular approach that may revolutionize computing-replacing silicon with carbon and microchips with DNA molecules. The book starts with an introduction to DNA computing, exploring the power of complementarity, the basics of biochemistry, and language and computation theory. It then brings the reader to the most advanced theories develop thus far in this emerging research area.

Marcus Contextual Grammars is the first monograph to present a class of grammars introduced about three decades ago, based on the fundamental linguistic phenomenon of strings-contexts interplay (selection). Most of the theoretical results obtained so far about the many variants of contextual grammars are presented with emphasis on classes of questions with relevance for applications in the study of natural language syntax: generative powers, descriptive and computational complexity, automata recognition, semilinearity, structure of the generated strings, ambiguity, regulated rewriting, etc. Constant comparison with families of languages in the Chomsky hierarchy is made. Connections with non-linguistic areas are established, such as molecular computing. Audience: Researchers and students in theoretical computer science (formal language theory and automata theory), computational linguistics, mathematical methods in linguistics, and linguists interested in formal models of syntax.

Membrane computing is a branch of natural computing which investigates computing models abstracted from the structure and functioning of living cells and from their interactions in tissues or higher-order biological structures. The models considered, called membrane systems (P systems), are parallel, distributed computing models, processing multisets of symbols in cell-like compartmental architectures. In many applications membrane systems have considerable advantages - among these are their inherently discrete nature, parallelism, transparency, scalability and nondeterminism.

In dedicated chapters, leading experts explain most of the applications of membrane computing reported so far, in biology, computer science, computer graphics and linguistics. The book also contains detailed reviews of the software tools used to simulate P systems.

This volume contains a selection of papers presented at the 10th Workshop on Membrane Computing, WMC 2009, which took place in Curtea de Arge, s, Romania, during August 24-27, 2009. The?rstthreeWorkshopsonMembraneComputingwereorganizedinCurtea de Arge, s, Romania - they took place in August 2000 (with the proceedings p- lished in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, volume 2235), in August 2001 (with a selection of papers published as a special issue ofFundamenta Inform- icae, volume 49, numbers 1-3, 2002), and in August 2002 (with the proceedings publishedinLectureNotesinComputerScience, volume2597).Thenextsixwo- shopswereorganizedinTarragona, Spain(inJuly2003), inMilan, Italy(inJune 2004), in Vienna, Austria (in July 2005), in Leiden, The Netherlands (in July 2006), in Thessaloniki, Greece (in June 2007), and in Edinburgh, UK (in July 2008), with the proceedings published as volumes 2933, 3365, 3850, 4361, 4860, and5391, respectively, ofSpringer'sLectureNotesinComputerScience. The workshop changed its name in 2010, and the series will continue as the Conference on Membrane Computing, with the next edition, CMC11, to be held in Jena, Germany. The tenth edition of WMC took place in Hotel Posada in Curtea de Arge, s (http: //www.posada.ro/)anditwasorganizedbytheNationalCollege"Vlaicu Voda" ? of Curtea de Arge, s, the University of Pite, sti, Romania, and the Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy, Bucharest, under the auspices of the European Molecular Computing Consortium (EMCC) and IEEE Compu- tional Intelligence Society EmergentTechnologies Technical Committee Mole- lar Computing Task Force, with the ?nancial and organizational support of the Council of Arge, s County and Seville University."

This volume contains a selection of papers presented at the 9th Workshop on Membrane Computing, WMC9, which took place in Edinburgh, UK, during July 28-31,2008. The ?rst three workshopson membrane computing were or- nized in Curtea de Arge, s, Romania - they took place in August 2000 (with the proceedings published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, volume 2235), in August 2001 (with a selection of papers published as a special issue of Fun- menta Informaticae, volume 49, numbers 1-3, 2002), and in August 2002 (with the proceedings published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, volume 2597). The next ?ve workshops were organized in Tarragona, Spain, in July 2003, in Milan, Italy, in June 2004, in Vienna, Austria, in July 2005, in Leiden, The Netherlands, in July 2006, and in Thessaloniki, Greece, in June 2007, with the proceedings published as volumes 2933, 3365, 3850, 4361, and 4860 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science."

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed extended postproceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Membrane Computing, WMC 2007, held in Thessaloniki, Greece, in June 2007 under the auspices of the European Molecular Computing Consortium (EMCC).

The 22 revised full papers presented together with 5 invited papers went through two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers in this volume cover all the main directions of research in membrane computing, ranging from theoretical topics in mathematics and computer science to application issues. A special attention was paid to the interaction of membrane computing with biology and computer science, focusing both on the biological roots of membrane computing, on applications of membrane computing in biology and medicine, and on possible electronically based implementations.