Semiorder is probably one of the most frequently ordered structures in science. It naturally appears in fields like psychometrics, economics, decision sciences, linguistics and archaeology. It explicitly takes into account the inevitable imprecisions of scientific instruments by allowing the replacement of precise numbers by intervals. The purpose of this book is to dissect this structure and to study its fundamental properties. The main subjects treated are the numerical representations of semiorders, the generalizations of the concept to valued relations, the aggregation of semiorders and their basic role in a general theoretical framework for multicriteria decision-aid methods. Audience: This volume is intended for students and researchers in the fields of decision analysis, management science, operations research, discrete mathematics, classification, social choice theory, and order theory, as well as for practitioners in the design of decision tools.

This textbook provides an introduction to the Catalan numbers and their remarkable properties, along with their various applications in combinatorics. Intended to be accessible to students new to the subject, the book begins with more elementary topics before progressing to more mathematically sophisticated topics. Each chapter focuses on a specific combinatorial object counted by these numbers, including paths, trees, tilings of a staircase, null sums in Zn+1, interval structures, partitions, permutations, semiorders, and more. Exercises are included at the end of book, along with hints and solutions, to help students obtain a better grasp of the material. The text is ideal for undergraduate students studying combinatorics, but will also appeal to anyone with a mathematical background who has an interest in learning about the Catalan numbers. “Roman does an admirable job of providing an introduction to Catalan numbers of a different nature from the previous ones. He has made an excellent choice of topics in order to convey the flavor of Catalan combinatorics. [Readers] will acquire a good feeling for why so many mathematicians are enthralled by the remarkable ubiquity and elegance of Catalan numbers.” - From the foreword by Richard Stanley

FLINS, originally an acronym for Fuzzy Logic and Intelligent Technologies in Nuclear Science, is now extended to Computational Intelligence for applied research. The contributions to the eighth edition in the series of FLINS conferences cover state-of-the-art research, development, and technology for computational intelligence systems in general, and for intelligent decision and control in particular.

FLINS, originally an acronym for Fuzzy Logic and Intelligent Technologies in Nuclear Science, is now extended to Computational Intelligence for applied research. The contributions to the eighth edition in the series of FLINS conferences cover state-of-the-art research, development, and technology for computational intelligence systems in general, and for intelligent decision and control in particular.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Visual Information Systems, VISUAL'99, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in June 1999. The 100 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The book is divided into topical sections on visual information systems, interactive visual query, Internet search engines, video parsing, spatial data, visual languages, features and indexes for image retrieval, object retrieval, ranking and performance, shape retrieval, retrieval systems, image compression, virtual environments, recognition systems, and visualization systems.