Uwe Naumann

Paul Hovland

Jean Utke

Christian H. Bischof

H. Martin Bücker

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.

Advances in Automatic Differentiation

Shaun Forth

Eric Phipps

Andrea Walther

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.

Recent Advances in Algorithmic Differentiation

Paul Hovland

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