SOFSEM 2000: Theory and Practice of Informatics

The international conference on current trends in the theory and practice of informatics SOFSEM 2000 was held 25 November2 December 2000 in the c- ference facilities of the Dev?et Skal (Nine Rocks) Hotel, Milovy, Czech-Moravian Highlands, the Czech Republic. It was already the 27th annual meeting in the series of SOFSEM conferences organized in either the Czech or the Slovak Rep- lic. Since its establishment in 1974, SOFSEM has gone through a long dev- opment in parallel with the entire ?eld of informatics. Currently SOFSEM is a wide-scope, multidisciplinary conference, with stress on the interplay between the theory and practice of informatics. The SOFSEM scienti?c program consists mainly of invited talks which determine the topics of the conference. Invited talks are complemented by short refereed talks contributed by SOFSEM parti- pants. The topics of invited talks are chosen so as to cover the span from theory to practice and to bring interesting research areas to the attention of conf- ence participants. For the year 2000, the following three streams were chosen for presentation by the SOFSEM Steering Committee: Trends in Algorithmics Information Technologies in Practice Computational Perception The above streams were covered through 16 invited talks given by prominent researchers. There were 18 contributed talks also presented, chosen by the int- national Program Committee from among 36 submitted papers. The program also included a panel on lessons learned from the Y2K problem.

Inhalt
Invited Talks.- Domain Engineering: A Software Engineering Discipline in Need of Research.- Exhaustive Search, Combinatorial Optimization and Enumeration: Exploring the Potential of Raw Computing Power.- The Incompressibility Method.- BioInformatics: Databases + Data Mining.- Algorithms for Rational Agents.- Simplified Witness Tree Arguments.- Software Testing & Diagnostics: Theory & Practice.- Physical Design of CMOS Chips in Six Easy Steps.- Analysis Patterns.- Information Society Technologies in Healthcare.- Towards High Speed Grammar Induction on Large Text Corpora.- Information Access Based on Associative Calculation.- Cheap VisionExploiting Ecological Niche and Morphology.- Hierarchies of Sensing and Control in Visually Guided Agents.- Recognizing Objects by Their Appearance Using Eigenimages.- Information Mining: Applications in Image Processing.- Contributed Papers.- An Automatic Composition Algorithm for Functional Logic Programs.- On the Approximation Ratio of the Group-Merge Algorithm for the Shortest Common Superstring Problem.- Fast Evolutionary Chains.- A Temporal Layered Knowledge Architecture for an Evolving Structured Environment.- On-Line Maximum-Order Induced Hereditary Subgraph Problems.- Quantum Pushdown Automata.- Use of Dependency Microcontexts in Information Retrieval.- Some Notes on the Information Flow in Read-Once Branching Programs.- On Vision-Based Orientation Method of a Robot Head in a Dark Cylindrical Pipe.- Autonomous Components.- Parallel Object Server for Fine Grained Objects.- Massively Parallel Pattern Recognition with Link Failures.- Finitary Observations in Regular Algebras.- Using Consensus Methods for Solving Conflicts of Data in Distributed Systems.- Optimisation of Artificial Neural Network Topology Applied in the ProsodyControl in Text-to-Speech Synthesis.- Robust Implementation of Finite Automata by Recurrent RBF Networks.- MDBASA Prototype of a Multidatabase Management System Based on Mobile Agents.- Computing the Dimension of Linear Subspaces.