This book collects various perspectives, contributed by both mathematicians and physicists, on the B-model and its role in mirror symmetry. Mirror symmetry is an active topic of research in both the mathematics and physics communities, but among mathematicians, the “A-model” half of the story remains much better-understood than the B-model. This book aims to address that imbalance. It begins with an overview of several methods by which mirrors have been constructed, and from there, gives a thorough account of the “BCOV” B-model theory from a physical perspective; this includes the appearance of such phenomena as the holomorphic anomaly equation and connections to number theory via modularity. Following a mathematical exposition of the subject of quantization, the remainder of the book is devoted to the B-model from a mathematician’s point-of-view, including such topics as polyvector fields and primitive forms, Givental’s ancestor potential, and integrable systems.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 47th International Conference on Objects, Components, Models and Patterns, TOOLS EUROPE 2009, held in Zurich, Switzerland, in June/July 2009. TOOLS has played a major role in the spread of object-oriented and component technologies. It has now broadened its scope beyond the original topics of object technology and component-based development to encompass all modern, practical approaches to software development. At the same time, TOOLS has kept its traditional spirit of technical excellence, its acclaimed focus on practicality, its well-proven combination of theory and applications, and its reliance on the best experts from academia and industry. The 17 regular papers and two short papers presented in this book, together with two invited papers, were carefully reviewed and selected from 67 submissions. The topics covered in this volume are reflection and aspects, models, theory, components, monitoring, and systems generation.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Information Computing and Applications, ICICA 2010, held in Qinhuangdao, China, in October 2011. The 97 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. They are organized in topical sections on computational economics and finance, computational statistics, mobile computing and applications, social networking and computing, intelligent computing and applications, internet and Web computing, paralelle and distributed computing, and system simulation and computing.