Preface Due to the development of hardware technologies (such as VLSI) in the early 1980s, the interest in parallel and distributive computing has been rapidly growingandinthelate1980sthestudyofparallelalgorithmsandarchitectures became one of the main topics in computer science. To bring the topic to educatorsandstudents, severalbooksonparallelcomputingwerewritten. The involvedtextbook IntroductiontoParallelAlgorithmsandArchitectures by F. Thomson Leighton in 1992 was one of the milestones in the development of parallel architectures and parallel algorithms. But in the last decade or so the main interest in parallel and distributive computing moved from the design of parallel algorithms and expensive parallel computers to the new distributive reality the world of interconnected computers that cooperate (often asynchronously) in order to solve di?erent tasks. Communication became one of the most frequently used terms of computer science because of the following reasons: (i) Considering the high performance of current computers, the communi- tion is often moretime consuming than the computing time of processors. As a result, the capacity of communication channels is the bottleneck in the execution of many distributive algorithms. (ii) Many tasks in the Internet are pure communication tasks. We do not want to compute anything, we only want to execute some information - change or to extract some information as soon as possible and as cheaply as possible. Also, we do not have a central database involving all basic knowledge. Instead, wehavea distributed memorywherethe basickno- edgeisdistributedamongthelocalmemoriesofalargenumberofdi?erent computers. The growing importance of solving pure communication tasks in the - terconnected world is the main motivation for writing this book."

This Festschrift volume is published in honor of Juraj Hromkovic on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Juraj Hromkovic is a leading expert in the areas of automata and complexity theory, algorithms for hard problems, and computer science education. The contributions in this volume reflect the breadth and impact of his work. The volume contains 35 full papers related to Juraj Hromkovic's research. They deal with various aspects of the complexity of finite automata, the information content of online problems, stability of approximation algorithms, reoptimization algorithms, computer science education, and many other topics within the fields of algorithmics and complexity theory. Moreover, the volume contains a prologue and an epilogue of laudatios from several collaborators, colleagues, and friends.

Presents the background and context of all ideas, concepts, algorithms, analyses and arguments before discussing details.
Accessible to both beginners as well as specialists.