Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank our collaborators from the Department of Informatics at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), the Cork Constraint Computation Centre at the University College Cork (Ireland) and the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust at the University of Luxembourg for the many interesting discussions that helped to improve the content and presentation of this book. In particular, we are grateful for the indispensable support of Christian Eichenberger during our journey through the Gaussian world and to Radu Marinescu and Nic Wilson for providing expert knowledge regarding inference, search methods and semiring systems. Jutta Langel and Jacek Jonczy both corrected parts of this book and provided valuable feedback. Special thank also goes to Cassie Craig from John Wiley & Sons, Inc. for the editing support and to the Swiss National Science Foundation, which financed the research stay of Marc Pouly at the Cork Constraint Computation Centre.

Marc Pouly & Jürg Kohlas