Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science, STACS 96, held in Grenoble, France in February 1996. The 52 revised papers presented were selected from a total of 185 submissions; also included are three invited papers. The volume addresses all current aspects of theoretical computer science and is organized in sections on complexity theory, automata theory, parallel algorithms, learning, parallel and distributed systems, cryptography, logic and database theory, algorithms, semantics and program verification, and communication complexity.