Paul Hovland - Böcker

The Fourth International Conference on Automatic Di?erentiation was held July20-23inChicago,Illinois.Theconferenceincludedaonedayshortcourse, 42 presentations, and a workshop for tool developers. This gathering of au- matic di?erentiation researchers extended a sequence that began in Breck- ridge, Colorado, in 1991 and continued in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1996 and Nice, France, in 2000. We invited conference participants and the general - tomatic di?erentiation community to submit papers to this special collection. The28acceptedpapersre?ectthestateoftheartinautomaticdi?erentiation. The number of automatic di?erentiation tools based on compiler techn- ogy continues to expand. The papers in this volume discuss the implem- tation and application of several compiler-based tools for Fortran, including the venerable ADIFOR, an extended NAGWare compiler, TAF, and TAPE- NADE. While great progress has been made toward robust, compiler-based tools for C/C++, most notably in the form of the ADIC and TAC++ tools, for now operator-overloading tools such as ADOL-C remain the undisputed champions for reverse-mode automatic di?erentiation of C++. Tools for - tomatic di?erentiation of high level languages, including COSY and ADiMat, continue to grow in importance as the productivity gains o?ered by high-level programming are recognized.

The Fifth International Conference on Automatic Differentiation held from August 11 to 15, 2008 in Bonn, Germany, is the most recent one in a series that began in Breckenridge, USA, in 1991 and continued in Santa Fe, USA, in 1996, Nice, France, in 2000 and Chicago, USA, in 2004. The 31 papers included in these proceedings re?ect the state of the art in automatic differentiation (AD) with respect to theory, applications, and tool development. Overall, 53 authors from institutions in 9 countries contributed, demonstrating the worldwide acceptance of AD technology in computational science. Recently it was shown that the problem underlying AD is indeed NP-hard, f- mally proving the inherently challenging nature of this technology. So, most likely, no deterministic “silver bullet” polynomial algorithm can be devised that delivers optimum performance for general codes. In this context, the exploitation of doma- speci?c structural information is a driving issue in advancing practical AD tool and algorithm development. This trend is prominently re?ected in many of the pub- cations in this volume, not only in a better understanding of the interplay of AD and certain mathematical paradigms, but in particular in the use of hierarchical AD approaches that judiciously employ general AD techniques in application-speci?c - gorithmic harnesses. In this context, the understanding of structures such as sparsity of derivatives, or generalizations of this concept like scarcity, plays a critical role, in particular for higher derivative computations.

The proceedings represent the state of knowledge in the area of algorithmic differentiation (AD). The 31 contributed papers presented at the AD2012 conference cover the application of AD to many areas in science and engineering as well as aspects of AD theory and its implementation in tools. For all papers the referees, selected from the program committee and the greater community, as well as the editors have emphasized accessibility of the presented ideas also to non-AD experts. In the AD tools arena new implementations are introduced covering, for example, Java and graphical modeling environments or join the set of existing tools for Fortran. New developments in AD algorithms target the efficiency of matrix-operation derivatives, detection and exploitation of sparsity, partial separability, the treatment of nonsmooth functions, and other high-level mathematical aspects of the numerical computations to be differentiated. Applications stem from the Earth sciences, nuclear engineering, fluid dynamics, and chemistry, to name just a few. In many cases the applications in a given area of science or engineering share characteristics that require specific approaches to enable AD capabilities or provide an opportunity for efficiency gains in the derivative computation. The description of these characteristics and of the techniques for successfully using AD should make the proceedings a valuable source of information for users of AD tools.