This volume is a collection of lectures on the current topics in various areas of physics which were presented at the Inauguration Conference of Asia-Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics.

This book constitutes the throughly refereed post-proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning, IDEAL 2003, held in Hong Kong, China in March 2003. The 164 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 321 submissions; for inclusion in this post-proceedings another round of revision was imposed. The papers are organized in topical sections an agents, automated learning, bioinformatics, data mining, multimedia information, and financial engineering.