Book excerpt: This dictionary contains 13,000 terms with more than 4,000 cross-references used in the following fields: automation, technology of management and regulation, computing machine and data processing, computer control, automation of industry, laser technology, theory of information and theory of signals, theory of algorithms and programming, philosophical bases of cybernetics, cybernetics and mathematical methods.Automation pertains to the theory, art, or technique of making a machine, a process or a device more fully automatic. Computers and information processing equipment play a large role in the automation of a process because of the inherent ability of a computer to develop decision that will, in effect, control or govern the process from the information received by the computer concerning the status of the process. Thus automation pertains to both the theory, and techniques of using automatic systems in industrial applications and the processes of investigation, design and conversion to automatic methods. Automatic control, automatic materials handling, automatic testing, automatic packaging, for continuous as well as batch processing, are all considered parts of the overall or completely automatic process.The Dictionary consists of two parts, Basic Table and Indexes. In the first part the English terms are listed alphabetically, numbered consecutively and followed by its German, French and Russian equivalents. English synonyms appear as cross-references to the main entries in their proper alphabetical order. The second part of the Dictionary, the Indexes, contains separate alphabetical indexes of the German, French and Russian terms. The reference number(s) with each term stands for the number of the English term(s) in the basic table.Elsevier's Dictionary of Automatic Technics will be a valuable tool for specialists, scientists, students and everyone who takes interest in the problems of investigation devoted to the design, development, and applications of methods and techniques for rendering a process of group of machines self-actuating, self-moving, or self-controlling.