Gerhard Goos

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science, FSTTCS'97. The 18 revised full papers presented were selected from a total of 68 submissions. Also included are five invited papers by Ed Clarke, Deepak Kapur, Madhu Sudan, Vijaya Ramachandran, and Moshe Vardi. Among the topics addressed are concurrency, Petri nets, graph computations, program verification, model checking, recursion theory, rewriting, and error-correcting codes.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Interactive Distributed Multimedia Systems and Telecommunication Services, IDMS'98, held in Oslo, Norway, in September 1998. The 23 revised full papers presented were carefully selected from a total of 68 submissions. Also included are seven position statements. The book is divided into topical sections on distributed multimedia applications; platforms for collaborative systems; MPEG; coding for WWW, wireless, and mobile environments; QoS and user aspects; flow control, congestion control, and multimedia streams; multimedia servers, documents, and authoring; and storage servers.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Visual Information Systems, VISUAL'99, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in June 1999. The 100 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The book is divided into topical sections on visual information systems, interactive visual query, Internet search engines, video parsing, spatial data, visual languages, features and indexes for image retrieval, object retrieval, ranking and performance, shape retrieval, retrieval systems, image compression, virtual environments, recognition systems, and visualization systems.

This volume contains the papers presented at the \First International Sym- sium on Foundations of Information and Knowledge Systems" (FoIKS 2000), which was held in Burg, Germany from February 14th to 17th, 2000. FoIKSis intendedto beabiannualeventfocussingontheoreticalfoundations ofinformationandknowledgesystems.Itaims to takeupthe oldtraditionofthe conferenceseries \MathematicalFundamentals ofDatabaseSystems" (MFDBS) which encouraged East-West collaboration in the e ld of database theory. F- mer MFDBS conferences were held in Dresden in 1987 (Springer LNCS 305, edited by Joachim Biskup, J anos Demetrovics, Jan Paredaens, and Bernhard Thalheim), in Visegr ad in 1989 (Springer LNCS 364, edited by J anos Demet- vics and Bernhard Thalheim), and in Rostock in 1991 (Springer LNCS 495, edited by Bernhard Thalheim, Jan os Demetrovics, and Hans-Detlef Gerhard). Another goal of the MFDBS conference series has always been to attract researchers working in mathematical e lds such as discrete mathematics, c- binatorics, logics, and nite model theory who are interested in applying their theories to researchon databaseand knowledgebase theory. To that end, FoIKS takes up the tradition of providing a forum for mathematical foundations in a speci c branch of computer science. A r st attempt to reestablish the MFDBS tradition was made in 1995 with a follow-up workshop \Semantics in Datab- es" to ICDT (Springer LNCS 1358, edited by Bernhard Thalheim and Leonid Libkin).

This book consitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification, CAV'98, held in Vancouver, BC, Canada, in June/July 1998. The 33 revised full papers and 10 tool papers presented were carefully selected from a total of 117 submissions. Also included are 11 invited contributions. Among the topics covered are modeling and specification formalisms; verification techniques like state-space exploration, model checking, synthesis, and automated deduction; various verification techniques; applications and case studies, and verification in practice.

Glamour. Duty. Tragedy: The Woman Behind the Princess. Sarah Bradford delivers an authoritative and explosive study of the greatest icon of the twentieth century: Diana.After more than a decade interviewing those closest to the Princess and her select circle, Sarah Bradford exposes the real Diana: the blighted childhood, the old-fashioned courtship which saw her capture the Prince of Wales, the damage caused by the spectre of Camilla Parker Bowles, through to the collapse of the royal marriage and Diana's final and complicated year as single woman.Diana paints an honest portrait of a woman riddled with contradictions and whose vulnerability and unique empathy with the suffering made her one of the most extraordinary figures of the modern age.