This volume of Lecture Notes in Computer Science contains revised versions of papers presented at the 15th International Conference on Implementation and Application of Automata, CIAA 2010. The conference was held at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, on August 12–15, 2010. The previous CIAA conferences were held in London, Ontario (2000), Pretoria (2001), Tours (2002), Santa Barbara (2003), Kingston (2004), Nice (2005), Taipei (2006), Prague (2007), San Francisco (2008) and Sydney (2009).

The CIAA meeting can be viewed as the main conference for researchers, application developers, and users of automata-based systems. The topics of the conference include applications of automata in, for example, computer-aided verification, natural language processing, pattern matching, data storage and retrieval, and bioinformatics, as well as foundational work on automata theory. The 26 full papers and 6 short papers were selected from 52 submissions. Each submitted paper was evaluated by at least three Program Committee members, with the help of external referees. We warmly thank the invited speakers, the authors of the  contributed papers, as well as the reviewers and the Program Committee members for their valuable work. All these efforts were the basis for the success of the conference.

During the conference, Cyril Allauzen, with co-authors Corinna Cortes and Mehryar Mohri, was presented with the CIAA 2010 Best Paper award for their paper entitled “Large-Scale Training of SVMs with Automata Kernels.” The paper describes transducer-based methods for improving the efficiency of training SVMs in machine-learning applications.

The authors of the papers included in these proceedings come from the following countries: Canada, China, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Taiwan, the UK and the USA. In addition, the conference had participants with affiliations in Belgium and Finland. We thank our sponsors for their generous financial support: the Fields Institute; MITACS; Office of the Vice-President (Research), University of Manitoba; and the Department of Computer Science, University of Manitoba. To conclude, we are indebted to Alfred Hofmann and Anna Kramer from Springer for the efficient collaboration in producing this volume.