A Mosaic of Computational Topics: from Classical to Novel

Book excerpt: This book, A Mosaic of Computational Topics: from Classical to Novel, is a collection of papers published to honor Professor Jetty Kleijn on the occasion of her 65th birthday. The scope and reach of her research is truly broad. She has made significant and lasting contributions in several research areas, both through the solving of challenging problems and in her pioneering of new research directions. She has published influential papers contributing to the foundations of computer science, in particular, in the area of formal languages and automata theory; to concurrency theory, in particular, Petri nets; and to natural computing, in particular bio-inspired computing and the computational modeling of bio-processes. A significant part of Professor Kleijn’s research portfolio is interdisciplinary, including her work on the Petri net modeling of biological processes and the development of novel models of information processing in bio-systems such as reaction systems. She is also passionately engaged in promoting the involvement of women in computer science. Jetty and her work are well-recognized by the scientific community, a fact demonstrated by the enthusiastic response to the invitation to contribute to this book, and the 14 carefully refereed papers collected together here explore a number of research topics that are either directly or indirectly related to research directions pursued by Jetty Kleijn in the course of her career.