Today we live in an information age: information has become a commodity, and every second thousands of new records are created. This explosion of massive data sets created by businesses, science and governments necessitates intelligent and more powerful computing paradigms so that users can benefit from this data. This information needs to be summarized and synthesized to support effective problem solving and decision making. The papers in this book assume an interdisciplinary approach based on three major methodologies: first, hybridization, i. e. , combining methods in order to harness their strengths and avoid their shortcomings; second, multiphase processing, i. e. , the step-wise preparation, evaluation and refinement of data; and, third, multi-agent and distributed processing, i. e. , using intelligent agents as well as Web or grid architectures. The final vision of the authors is an intelligent information technology, encompassing theories and applications from, for example, artificial intelligence, data mining, grid computing, and statistical learning.
This monograph presents the current state of research and development in both theoretical and application aspects of intelligent information analysis. It is a source of reference and includes numerous examples for researchers, graduate students and advanced professionals working in areas such as electronic commerce, business intelligence, and knowledge grids.
Author Biography:
Ning Zhong is currently head of Knowledge Information Systems Laboratory, and a professor in Department of Systems and Information Engineering, Graduate School, Maebashi Institute of Technology, Japan. He is also CEO of Web Intelligence Laboratory, Inc., a new type of venture intelligent IT business company. Before moving to Maebashi Institute of Technology, he was an associate professor in Department of Computer Science and Systems Engineering, Yamaguchi University, Japan. He is also a guest professor of Beijing University of Technology since 1998. He is the co-founder and co-chair of Web Intelligence Consortium (WIC), vice chair of the executive committee of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Computational Intelligence (TCCI), the advisory board of ACM SIGART, steering committee of IEEE International Conferences on Data Mining (ICDM), the advisory board of International Rough Set Society, steering committee of Pacific-Asia Conferences on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD), coordinator and member of advisory board of a Special Interest Group on Granular Computing in Berkeley Initiative in Soft Computing (BISC/SIG-GrC). Even more information can be found on his home page http://www.kis-lab.com/zhong/ Dr. Jiming Liu is the Head of Computer Science Department at Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU). He leads the AAMAS/AOC Research Group (i.e., Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems / Autonomy-Oriented Computing) at HKBU. He holds a B.Sc. degree in Physics from East China Normal University in Shanghai, an M.A. degree in Educational Technology from Concordia University in Montreal, and an M.Eng. and a Ph.D. degrees both in Electrical Engineering from McGill University in Montreal. In Feb.-July 1999, Dr. Liu was an invited Visiting Scholar in Computer Science Department, Stanford University, where he was associated with the AI & Robotics Laboratory and taught advanced graduate classes on topics related to Robot Learning, Neural Robots, and Evolutionary Robotics. He is Guest Professor at University of Science and Technology of China, East China Normal University (Software Engineering Institute), and Beijing University of Technology, as well as Adjunct Fellow at E-Business Technology Institute (ETI - a joint partnership institute between IBM and University of Hong Kong). Dr. Liu is the co-founder of Web Intelligence Consortium (WIC), an international organization dedicated to promoting world-wide scientific research and industrial development in the era of Web and agent Intelligence. He has founded andserved, or is serving, as Program, Conference, Workshop, and General Chairs for several international conferences and workshops, including The IEEE/WIC International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI) series and The IEEE/WIC International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT) series, and is presently serving as the Senior Program Committee Member, Program Committee Member, and Steering/Planning Committee Member for many major international conferences.
