The papers contained in this volumewere presented at the 11thAnnual Sym- sium on CombinatorialPattern Matching, held June 21-23, 2000 at the Univ- sit edeMontr eal. They were selected from 44 abstracts submitted in response to the call for papers. In addition, there were invited lectures by Andrei Broder (AltaVista), Fernando Pereira (AT&T Research Labs), and Ian H. Witten (U- versity of Waikato). The symposium was preceded by a two-day summer school set up to - tract and train young researchers. The lecturers at the school were Greg Butler, ClementLam,andGusGrahne:BLAST!Howdoyousearchsequencedatabases?, DavidBryant:Phylogeny,Ra aeleGiancarlo: Algorithmicaspectsof speech rec- nition, Nadia El-Mabrouk: Genome rearrangement,LaxmiParida: Flexib- pattern discovery, and Ian H. Witten: Adaptive text mining: inferring structure from sequences. Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM) addresses issues of searching and matching strings and more complicated patterns such as trees, regular expr- sions graphs, point sets, and arrays.
The goal is to derive non-trivial combi- torial properties of such structures and to exploit these properties in order to achieve superior performance for the corresponding computational problems. Over recent years a steady ?ow of high-quality research on this subject has changed a sparse set of isolated results into a fully-?edged area of algorithmics.