The second Symposium on Cellular Automata ``Journées Automates Cellulaires'' (JAC 2010) took place in Turku, Finland, on December 15-17, 2010. The first two conference days were held in the Educarium building of the University of Turku, while the talks of the third day were given onboard passenger ferry boats in the beautiful Turku archipelago, along the route Turku--Mariehamn--Turku. The conference was organized by FUNDIM, the Fundamentals of Computing and Discrete Mathematics research center at the mathematics department of the University of Turku.

The program of the conference included 17 submitted papers that were selected by the international program committee, based on three peer reviews of each paper. These papers form the core of these proceedings. I want to thank the members of the program committee and the external referees for the excellent work that have done in choosing the papers to be presented in the conference.

In addition to the submitted papers, the program of JAC 2010 included four distinguished invited speakers: Michel Coornaert (Université de Strasbourg, France), Bruno Durand (Université de Provence, Marseille, France), Dora Giammarresi (Université di Roma Tor Vergata, Italy) and Martin Kutrib (Universität Giessen, Germany). I sincerely thank the invited speakers for accepting our invitation to come and give a plenary talk in the conference. The invited talk by Bruno Durand was eventually given by his co-author Alexander Shen, and I thank him for accepting to make the presentation with a short notice. Abstracts or extended abstracts of the invited presentations appear in the first part of this volume.

The program also included several informal presentations describing very recent developments and ongoing research projects. I wish to thank all the speakers for their contribution to the success of the symposium. I also would like to thank the sponsors and our collaborators: the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, the French National Research Agency project EMC (ANR-09-BLAN-0164), Turku Centre for Computer Science, the University of Turku, and Centro Hotel. Finally, I sincerely thank the members of the local organizing committee for making the conference possible.

These proceedings are published both in an electronic format and in print. The electronic proceedings are available on the electronic repository HAL, managed by several French research agencies. The printed version is published in the general publications series of TUCS, Turku Centre for Computer Science. We thank both HAL and TUCS for accepting to publish the proceedings.

Turku, December 2010

Jarkko Kari