Guest Editorial for "Group Testing: models and applications"

The search model known as group testing has recently seen a new raising interest in several areas of computer science with new applications in pattern matching, data structures for static membership, communication protocols and more. Group testing and group testing like models have also proved useful in furthering new fertile fields like streaming computation and compressed sensing. The use of randomness extraction structures for group testing has provided new stimulus in the field.The basic group testing problem is about identifying a set of positive ele- ments in a given search space by means of tests or queries asking whether a certain subset includes at least one of the positive elements. In a broad sense we can rephrase group testing as the problem of determining some special sub structure within a large structure. Due to its foundational characters it is not surprising that the basic structures for group testing are rediscovered in very different scenarios. In this respect, group testing also serves as a perfect ground for cross-fertilization among different fields of research.