Theory and practice of informatics

The international conference on current trends in the theory and practice of informatics SOFSEM 2000 was held 25 November–2 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.