The International Symposium on Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence is an annual forum that brings together ideas, projects, lessons, etc. associated with distr- uted computing, artificial intelligence and its applications in different themes. This meeting has been held at the University of Salamanca from the 22th to the 24th of October 2008. This symposium has be organized by the Biomedicine, Intelligent S- tem and Educational Technology Research Group (http://bisite. usal. es/) of the Univ- sity of Salamanca. The technology transfer in this field is still a challenge and for that reason this type of contributions has been specially considered in this edition. This c- ference is the forum in which to present application of innovative techniques to complex problems. The artificial intelligence is changing our society. Its application in distr- uted environments, such as the Internet, electronic commerce, mobile communications, wireless devices, distributed computing, and so on is increasing and is becoming an element of high added value and economic potential, both industrial and research. These technologies are changing constantly as a result of the large research and technical effort being undertaken in both universities and businesses. The exchange of ideas between scientists and technicians from both academic and business areas is essential to facilitate the development of systems that meet the demands of today's society.

The book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Information Processing and Management of Uncertainty in Knowledge-Based Systems, IPMU 2010, held in Dortmund, Germany from June 28 - July 2, 2010. The 77 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 320 submissions and reflect the richness of research in the field of Computational Intelligence and represent developments on topics as: machine learning, data mining, pattern recognition, uncertainty handling, aggregation and fusion of information as well as logic and knowledge processing.

This book provides a comprehensive yet fresh perspective for the cutting-edge CI-oriented approaches in water resources planning and management. The book takes a deep dive into topics like meta-heuristic evolutionary optimization algorithms (e.g., GA, PSA, etc.), data mining techniques (e.g., SVM, ANN, etc.), probabilistic and Bayesian-oriented frameworks, fuzzy logic, AI, deep learning, and expert systems. These approaches provide a practical approach to understand and resolve complicated and intertwined real-world problems that often imposed serious challenges to traditional deterministic precise frameworks. The topic caters to postgraduate students and senior researchers who are interested in computational intelligence approach to issues stemming from water and environmental sciences.

This book focuses on metaheuristic methods and its applications to real-world problems in Engineering. The first part describes some key metaheuristic methods, such as Bat Algorithms, Particle Swarm Optimization, Differential Evolution, and Particle Collision Algorithms. Improved versions of these methods and strategies for parameter tuning are also presented, both of which are essential for the practical use of these important computational tools. The second part then applies metaheuristics to problems, mainly in Civil, Mechanical, Chemical, Electrical, and Nuclear Engineering. Other methods, such as the Flower Pollination Algorithm, Symbiotic Organisms Search, Cross-Entropy Algorithm, Artificial Bee Colonies, Population-Based Incremental Learning, Cuckoo Search, and Genetic Algorithms, are also presented. The book is rounded out by recently developed strategies, or hybrid improved versions of existing methods, such as the Lightning Optimization Algorithm, Differential Evolution with Particle Collisions, and Ant Colony Optimization with Dispersion – state-of-the-art approaches for the application of computational intelligence to engineering problems. The wide variety of methods and applications, as well as the original results to problems of practical engineering interest, represent the primary differentiation and distinctive quality of this book. Furthermore, it gathers contributions by authors from four countries – some of which are the original proponents of the methods presented – and 18 research centers around the globe.

Conference held July 8-11, 2012, in Vilnius, Lithuania.