R.G.MILES XHP Consulting Ltd, Gloucester. This book is one of two volumes containing papers for presentation at the British Computer Society Expert Systems 98 conference. This is the annual conference of th the BCS Specialist Group on Expert Systems and is in its 18 year. During its lifetime it has established itself as the premier Expert Systems conference in the UK. The conference is attracting an increasing number of papers world-wide and this year in excess of 70% were from research groups outside the UK. This volume includes all papers accepted for the Technical Stream of Expert Systems 98 and presented at the conference in December 1998. The papers within this stream present innovative, new research work. The companion volume, Applications and Innovations in Expert Systems VI, includes all papers accepted for the application stream of the conference. This stream has become the premier European conference on applications of Expert Systems. The papers accepted for presentation within the Technical Stream cover a broad range of research within Expert Systems and fit into four broad categories: ontological frameworks, knowledge base development, classifiers and neuro-fuzzy systems. The award for best Technical paper has been made to David McSherry, from the University of Ulster, for his paper entitled "Strategic Induction of Decision Trees".

E-commerce has passed through a number of stages in the minds of most readers of the daily press. Initially it was the province of the specialist and considered almost irrelevant to the needs and activities of everyday life - companies looking for venture capital in this area had little if any chance of obtaining sufficient funds from the rather conservative investors who provided the only source of start-up capital. Then came the dot. com boom -and suddenly e-commerce was the most exciting topic possible! Venture capital was available from every possible source and almost any company with a . com in its name could be assured of instant funding on request. This boom was, inevitably, followed by the dot. com bust and the press wamed that the days of e-commerce were gone, perhaps never to return. This apparently confusing 'stages of growth' model is in reality nothing ofthe sort. E-commerce is simply the logical outcome of combining computers with tele communications networks. The astonishing changes which a global economy has brought with it are reflected in the changes to the way we do business which are increasingly synonymous with e-commerce. Indeed, the term e-commerce itself is coming to mean only the transaction-based component of e-business-'any process that a business organisation conducts over a computer-mediated network' as Thomas Mesenbourg ofthe U. S. Census Bureau said in 1999.

th 2002 DEXA, the 13 International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications was held on September 2–6, 2002, at the Université Aix–Marseille II, France. The quickly growing field of information systems required the establishment of more specialized discussion platforms (the DaWaK conference, EC-Web conference, eGOV conference and DEXA workshops), and there were held in parallel with DEXA, also in Aix-en-Provence. The resulting book was prepared with great effort. Starting with the preparation of submitted papers, the papers went through the reviewing process. The accepted papers were revised to final versions by their authors and arranged to the conference program. This year 241 papers were submitted and our thanks go to all who have contributed. The program committee and the supporting reviewers produced altogether about 730 referee reports, on average three reports per paper, and selected 89 papers for presentation. The papers presented here encompass the extensive domain of databases; together with the other conferences and workshops of the DEXA event cluster a vast part of applied computer science was covered. In this way DEXA has blazed the trail. At this point we would like to acknowledge to all institutions which actively supported this conference and made it possible. These are: • IUT (Université Aix – Marseille II), • FAW, • DEXA Association, • the Austrian Computer Society, • and Microsoft Research

Contains papers presented at "Expert Systems 88", the eighth annual conference of the British Computer Society Specialist Group on Expert Systems, held in Brighton in December 1988. Covers many aspects of current work, in particular, theoretical topics, practical techniques and real applications of expert systems (a wide spectrum of commercial and industrial interest). The theme of the 1988 conference was "integrating with mainstream software development." No index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The past 50 years have witnessed a revolution in computing and related communications technologies. The contributions of industry and university researchers to this revolution are manifest; less widely recognized is the major role the federal government played in launching the computing revolution and sustaining its momentum. Funding a Revolution examines the history of computing since World War II to elucidate the federal government's role in funding computing research, supporting the education of computer scientists and engineers, and equipping university research labs. It reviews the economic rationale for government support of research, characterizes federal support for computing research, and summarizes key historical advances in which government-sponsored research played an important role. Funding a Revolution contains a series of case studies in relational databases, the Internet, theoretical computer science, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality that demonstrate the complex interactions among government, universities, and industry that have driven the field. It offers a series of lessons that identify factors contributing to the success of the nation's computing enterprise and the government's role within it.

The papers in this volume are the refereed application papers presented at AI-2007, the Twenty-seventh SGAI International Conference on Innovative Techniques and Applications of Artificial Intelligence, held in Cambridge in December 2007. The papers present new and innovative developments in the field, divided into sections on Synthesis and Prediction, Scheduling and Search, Diagnosis and Monitoring, Classification and Design, and Analysis and Evaluation. This is the fifteenth volume in the Applications and Innovations series. The series serves as a key reference on the use of AI Technology to enable organisations to solve complex problems and gain significant business benefits. The Technical Stream papers are published as a companion volume under the title Research and Development in Intelligent Systems XXIV.

This six-volume set presents cutting-edge advances and applications of expert systems. Because expert systems combine the expertise of engineers, computer scientists, and computer programmers, each group will benefit from buying this important reference work. An "expert system" is a knowledge-based computer system that emulates the decision-making ability of a human expert. The primary role of the expert system is to perform appropriate functions under the close supervision of the human, whose work is supported by that expert system. In the reverse, this same expert system can monitor and double check the human in the performance of a task. Human-computer interaction in our highly complex world requires the development of a wide array of expert systems. Expert systems techniques and applications are presented for a diverse array of topics including Experimental design and decision support The integration of machine learning with knowledge acquisition for the design of expert systems Process planning in design and manufacturing systems and process control applications Knowledge discovery in large-scale knowledge bases Robotic systems Geograhphic information systems Image analysis, recognition and interpretation Cellular automata methods for pattern recognition Real-time fault tolerant control systems CAD-based vision systems in pattern matching processes Financial systems Agricultural applications Medical diagnosis