Future Directions for Intelligent Systems and Information Sciences

This edited volume comprises invited chapters that cover five areas of the current and the future development of intelligent systems and information sciences. Half of the chapters were presented as invited talks at the Workshop "Future Directions for Intelligent Systems and Information Sciences" held in Dunedin, New Zealand, 22-23 November 1999 after the International Conference on Neuro-Information Processing (lCONIPI ANZIISI ANNES '99) held in Perth, Australia. In order to make this volume useful for researchers and academics in the broad area of information sciences I invited prominent researchers to submit materials and present their view about future paradigms, future trends and directions. Part I contains chapters on adaptive, evolving, learning systems. These are systems that learn in a life-long, on-line mode and in a changing environment. The first chapter, written by the editor, presents briefly the paradigm of Evolving Connectionist Systems (ECOS) and some of their applications. The chapter by Sung-Bae Cho presents the paradigms of artificial life and evolutionary programming in the context of several applications (mobile robots, adaptive agents of the WWW). The following three chapters written by R.Duro, J.Santos and J.A.Becerra (chapter 3), GCoghill . (chapter 4), Y.Maeda (chapter 5) introduce new techniques for building adaptive, learning robots.

The book introduces and discusses the future trends in computer science and artificial intelligence. These trends include image and speech technologies; virtual reality and multimedia systems; evolving systems and artificial life; artificial and natural neural networks; brain-computers; the Web, the intelligent agents on it, and the distributed processing systems; mobile robots in a real and in a virtual environment; bioinformatics, and the marriage of genetic engineering and information science. The book comprises chapters written by well known specialists in this field and can be used by scientists and graduate students from different areas, as well as by a wider audience of people interested in the present and future development of intelligent systems, in all areas of information sciences.