Acta Cybernetica 2011/2. [antikvár]

Preface This special issue contains papers on topics of the workshop "Weighted Automata: Theory and Applications (WATA 2010)" which took place at the Universitát Leipzig, Germany, from May 3-7, 2010. As for its predecessors WATA 2002, WATA 2004, WATA 2006, and WATA 2008, the goal of this workshop was to highlight the field of weighted automata, ranging from the theory of formai power series and probabilistic logics to applications for real-time systems and natural language processing. The workshop was attended by 48 participants from 11 countries. Three tuto-rials were given by Paul Gastin (Cachan, Francé), Kim Larsen (Aalborg, Denmark), Mark-Jan Nederhof (St. Andrews, UK). In addition, six invited lectures were presented by Christel Baier (Dresden, Germany), Patricia Bouyer-Decitre (Cachan, Francé), Miroslav Ciric (Nis, Serbia), Zoltán Ésik (Szeged, Hungary), Dietrich Kuske (Bordeaux, Francé), Andreas Maletti (Tarragona, Spain). Furthermore, 21 talks were selected as contributed communications. This workshop was financially supported by the ESF activity "Automata: from Mathematics to Applications (AutoMathA)" and by "Vereinigung von Förderern und Freunden der Universitát Leipzig e.V.". After the workshop, a call for papers for a special issue of "Acta Cybernetica" on "Weighted Automata: Theory and Applications" was issued. Following the standard refereeing procedure, we were pleased to accept the present two papers for this special issue. Manfréd Droste (Leipzig) Heiko Vogler (Dresden) October 2011