Preface Volume 45

AbstractForewordThis volume contains the Proceedings of MFPS 17, the Seventeenth Conference on the Mathematical Foundations of Programming Semantics. The conference was hosted by the Basic Research in Computer Science and Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark, and took place from May 23 through May 26, 2001.MFPS 17 featured invited talks by seven renowned scholars: •Olivier Danvy Aarhus•Joshua Guttman Mitre Corporation•Neil Jones DIKU•Kim Larsen Aalborg•Prakash Panangaden McGill•Jan Rutten CWI•Glynn Winskel CambridgeThere also were three special sessions: 1.A session honoring Neil Jones (DIKU) organized by Olivier Danvy (Aarhus) and David Schmidt (Kansas State University). The session began with Olivier Danvy's invited address, and included talks by Radhia Cousot (Ecole Polytechnique, Paris), John Hannan (Penn State), John Hughes (Chalmers), David Schmidt and Peter Sestoft (ITU and Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University).2.A session on model checking organized by Gavin Lowe (Oxford). The session began with Kim Parsen's invited address, and included talks by Jose Desharnais (Laval), Michael Huth (Kansas State and Imperial College), Henrik Jensen (BRICS), Marta Kwiatkowska (Birmingham) and Gavin Lowe.3.A session on security organized by Catherine Meadows (NRL). The session began with Joshua Guttman's invited address, and included talks by Andrew Gordon (Microsoft, Cambridge) and Alan Jeffrey (DePaul), Gavin Lowe, Thomas Jensen (INRIA), Dusko Pavlovic (Kestrel), Catherine Meadows and Andre Scedrov (Penn).The remainder of the program was made up of papers selected by the Program Committee from those submitted in response to the Call for Papers that was circulated in Fall, 2000. The Program Committee was co-chaired by Stephen Brookes (CMU) and Michael Mislove (Tulane) and included Lars Birkedal (ITU), Rance Cleaveland (SUNY, Stony Brook), Marcelo Fiore (Cambridge), Matthew Hennessy (Sussex), Alan Jeffrey (DePaul), Achim Jung (Birmingham), Gavin Lowe (Oxford), Catherine Meadows (NRL), Peter O'Hearn (QMW), Suysan Older (Syracuse), Dusko Pavlovic (Kestrel), Uday Reddy (Birmingham), Giuseppe Rosolini (Genoa), Davide Sangiori (INRIA) and Andre Scedrov (Penn). The Organizers of the MFPS series are Stephen Brookes, Michael Main (Colorado), Austin Melton (Kent State), Michael Mislove and David Schmidt. The Local Arrangements for the meeting were overseen by Olivier Danvy and Andrzej Filinski, both of BRICS and Aarhus. We are grateful to these colleagues for having so efficiently overseen the local arrangements. We also are happy to acknowledge the exceptional efforts of Karen Kjer Müller, who literally anticipated almost all of the needs of participants, and saw to it that every aspect of the meeting went off without any problems.Finally, we are extremely grateful for the financial support provided by BRICS and by the US Office of Naval Research, without which the meeting could not have taken place. We are particularly grateful to Dr. Ralph Wachter for his continuing interest in the MFPS series and the support his program in Software Systems has provided the series.Stephen Brookes and Michael Mislove, Guest EditorsDedicationThe Organizers of the MFPS series are pleased to dedicate these Proceedings to Neil Jones for his continuing inspiration to the students and researchers in theoretical computer science. Neil has been a regular participant in the MFPS series, dating from his invited address at MFPS III in 1987. MFPS appreciates the continued inspiration that his teaching and research have provided and that his addresses to the MFPS community have so clearly elucidated