This specially commissioned volume presents a collection of expository papers on major topics that are representative for computer science today. The 38 contributions demonstrate the scope and stature of the field today and give an impression of the motivations and challenges for tomorrow.

A quantum jump in computer science.- Artificial life and real world computing.- Recurrent neural networks.- Scalable computing.- Efficient use of parallel & distributed systems: From theory to practice.- Experimental validation of models of parallel computation.- Quo vadetis, parallel machine models?.- Templates for linear algebra problems.- The ART behind IDEAS.- Algorithmic number theory and its relationship to computational complexity.- Edge-coloring algorithms.- Towards a computational theory of genome rearrangements.- Algebraic topology and distributed computing a primer.- Differential BDDs.- Algorithmic techniques for geometric optimization.- All the needles in a haystack: Can exhaustive search overcome combinatorial chaos?.- Fundamental limitations on search algorithms: Evolutionary computing in perspective.- Mathematical system models as a basis of software engineering.- Formulations and formalisms in software architecture.- The Oz Programming Model.- Standard Generalized Markup Language: Mathematical and philosophical issues.- Avoiding the undefined by underspecification.- Towards a theory of recursive structures.- Chu spaces and their interpretation as concurrent objects.- Abstracting unification: A key step in the design of logic program analyses.- Programming Satan's computer.- Petri Net models of distributed algorithms.- Symmetry and induction in model checking.- Alternating automata and program verification.- Reasoning about actions and change with ramification.- Trends in active vision.- Computational machine learning in theory and praxis.- Fuzzy sets as a tool for modeling.- Information retrieval and informative reasoning.- Database transaction models.- Multimedia authoring tools: State of the art and research challenges.- Computational models for distributed multimedia applications.- Hypermedia systems as internet tools.