The papers contained in this volume were presented at the 13th Annual S- posium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching, held July 3–5, 2002 at the Hotel Uminonakamichi, in Fukuoka, Japan. They were selected from 37 abstracts s- mitted in response to the call for papers. In addition, there were invited lectures by Shinichi Morishita (University of Tokyo) and Hiroki Arimura (Kyushu U- versity). 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, in various formats. The goal is to derive n- trivial combinatorial properties of such structures and to exploit these properties in order to achieve superior performance for the corresponding computational problems. On the other hand, an important goal is to analyze and pinpoint the properties and conditions under which searches cannot be performed e?ciently. Over the past decade a steady ?ow of high-quality research on this subject has changed a sparse set of isolated results into a full-?edged area of algorithmics. This area is continuing to grow even further due to the increasing demand for speed and e?ciency that stems from important applications such as the World Wide Web, computational biology, computer vision, and multimedia systems. These involve requirements for information retrieval in heterogeneous databases, data compression, and pattern recognition. The objective of the annual CPM gathering is to provide an international forum for research in combinatorial p- tern matching and related applications.
