This Festschrift is in honor of Mario de Jesús Pérez-Jiménez, Professor in the Department of Computer Science of University of Seville, Spain, on the occasion of his 70th birthday. The title of this volume reflects both his main research area, viz., Natural Computing, and the guiding principle of his functioning: “once you choose to do something, enjoy doing it". The respect that Professor Mario de Jesús Pérez-Jiménez enjoys in the scientific community was well demonstrated by the enthusiastic response received to the request to contribute to this book. The contributions by more than 70 authors from 15 countries cover a wide spectrum of research areas and reflect well the broad range of research interests of Professor Mario de Jesús Pérez-Jiménez. The research areas presented in this Festschrift include membrane computing, spiking neural networks, phylogenetic networks, ant colonies optimization, workbench for biocomputing, reaction systems, entropy of computation, rewriting systems, and insertion-deletion systems.

The field of natural computing has been the focus of a substantial research effort in recent decades. One particular strand of this research concerns the development of computational algorithms using metaphorical inspiration from systems and phenomena that occur in the natural world. These naturally inspired computing algorithms have proven to be successful problem-solvers across domains as diverse as management science, bioinformatics, finance, marketing, engineering, architecture and design. This book is a comprehensive introduction to natural computing algorithms, suitable for academic and industrial researchers and for undergraduate and graduate courses on natural computing in computer science, engineering and management science.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Natural Computing, TPNC 2021, held virtually, in December 2021. The 9 full papers presented together with 3 invited talks, in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 14 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections named Applications of Natural Computing, Deep Learning and Transfer Learning, Evolutionary and Swarm Algorithms.

Drawing on interviews with 15 leading scientists, the authors present an unexpected vision: the future of computing is a synthesis with nature.

The papers in this volume present theoretical insights and report practical applications both for neural networks, genetic algorithms and evolutionary computation. In the field of natural computing, swarm optimization, bioinformatics and computational biology contributions are no less compelling. A wide selection of contributions report applications of neural networks to process engineering, robotics and control. Contributions also abound in the field of evolutionary computation particularly in combinatorial and optimization problems. Many papers are dedicated to machine learning and heuristics, hybrid intelligent systems and soft computing applications. Some papers are devoted to quantum computation. In addition, kernel based algorithms, able to solve tasks other than classification, represent a revolution in pattern recognition bridging existing gaps. Further topics are intelligent signal processing and computer vision.

This book presents state of the art research in theoretical computer science and related ?elds. In particular, the following areas are discussed: automata theory, formal languages and combinatorics of words, graph transformations, Petri nets, concurrency, as well as natural and molecular computing. The articles are written by leading researchers in these areas. The writers were originally invited to contribute to this book but then the normal refereeing procedure was applied as well. All of the articles deal with some issue that has been under vigorous study during recent years. Still, the topics range from very classical ones to issues raised only two or three years ago. Both survey articles and papers attacking speci?c research problems are included. The book highlights some key issues of theoretical computer science, as they seem to us now at the beginning of the new millennium. Being a comprehensive overview of some of the most active current research in theoretical computer science, it should be of de?nite interest for all researchers in the areas covered. The topics range from basic decidability and the notion of information to graph grammars and graph transformations, and from trees and traces to aqueous algorithms, DNA encoding and self-assembly. Special e?ort has been given to lucid presentation. Therefore, the book should be of interest also for advanced students.

The theoretical basis of membrane computing was established in the early 2000s with fundamental research into the computational power, complexity aspects and relationships with other (un)conventional computing paradigms. Although this core theoretical research has continued to grow rapidly and vigorously, another area of investigation has since been added, focusing on the applications of this model in many areas, most prominently in systems and synthetic biology, engineering optimization, power system fault diagnosis and mobile robot controller design. The further development of these applications and their broad adoption by other researchers, as well as the expansion of the membrane computing modelling paradigm to other applications, call for a set of robust, efficient, reliable and easy-to-use tools supporting the most significant membrane computing models. This work provides comprehensive descriptions of such tools, making it a valuable resource for anyone interested in membrane computing models.