This volume is an outcome of the International Conference on Algebra in celebration of the 70th birthday of Professor Shum Kar-Ping which was held in Gadjah Mada University on 7?10 October 2010. As a consequence of the wide coverage of his research interest and work, it presents 54 research papers, all original and referred, describing the latest research and development, and addressing a variety of issues and methods in semigroups, groups, rings and modules, lattices and Hopf Algebra. The book also provides five well-written expository survey articles which feature the structure of finite groups by A Ballester-Bolinches, R Esteban-Romero, and Yangming Li; new results of Gr”bner-Shirshov basis by L A Bokut, Yuqun Chen, and K P Shum; polygroups and their properties by B Davvaz; main results on abstract characterizations of algebras of n-place functions obtained in the last 40 years by Wieslaw A Dudek and Valentin S Trokhimenko; Inverse semigroups and their generalizations by X M Ren and K P Shum. Recent work on cones of metrics and combinatorics done by M M Deza et al. is included.

The book aims to exemplify the recent developments in operad theory, in universal algebra and related topics in algebraic topology and theoretical physics. The conference has established a better connection between mathematicians working on operads (mainly the French team) and mathematicians working in universal algebra (primarily the Chinese team), and to exchange problems, methods and techniques from these two subject areas.

The LNAI series reports state-of-the-art results in computer science research, development, and education, at a high level and in both printed and electronic form. Enjoying tight cooperation with the R&D community, with numerous individuals, as well as with prestigious organizations and societies, LNAI has grown into the most comperhensive computer science research forum avaiable. The scope of LNAI spans the whole range of artificial intelligence and intelligent Information processing incliding interdisciplinary topics in a variety of application fields. In parallel to the printed book, each new volume is published electronically in LNCS Online.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Algebraic Biology, ANB 2010, held at the Castle of Hagenberg, Austria in July/August 2010. The conference is a follow up of the AB Conference. The 10 papers were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on mathematical modeling, system analysis and design, genomics, molecular structure analysis, automata theory, artificial intelligence, sequence analysis, automated reasoning, formal language and hybrid symbolic numerical methods.