Management Information Systems provides comprehensive and integrative coverage of essential new technologies, information system applications, and their impact on business models and managerial decision-making in an exciting and interactive manner. The twelfth edition focuses on the major changes that have been made in information technology over the past two years, and includes new opening, closing, and Interactive Session cases.

This volume contains the proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Hybrid - stems: Computation and Control (HSCC 2001) held in Rome, Italy on March 28-30, 2001. The Workshop on Hybrid Systems attracts researchers from in- stry and academia interested in modeling, analysis, synthesis, and implemen- tion of dynamic and reactive systems involving both discrete (integer, logical, symbolic) and continuous behaviors. It is a forum for the discussion of the - test developments in all aspects of hybrid systems, including formal models and computational representations, algorithms and heuristics, computational tools, and new challenging applications. The Fourth HSCC International Workshop continues the series of workshops held in Grenoble, France (HART’97), Berkeley, California, USA (HSCC’98), N- megen, The Netherlands (HSCC’99), and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA (HSCC 2000). Proceedings of these workshops have been published in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series by Springer-Verlag. In line with the beautiful work that led to the design of the palace in which the workshop was held, Palazzo Lancellotti in Rome, resulting from the col- boration of many artists and architects of di erent backgrounds, the challenge faced by the hybrid system community is to harmonize and extract the best from two main research areas: computer science and control theory.

We describe in this book, new methods and applications of hybrid intelligent systems using soft computing techniques. Soft Computing (SC) consists of several intelligent computing paradigms, including fuzzy logic, neural networks, and evolutionary al- rithms, which can be used to produce powerful hybrid intelligent systems. The book is organized in five main parts, which contain a group of papers around a similar subject. The first part consists of papers with the main theme of intelligent control, which are basically papers that use hybrid systems to solve particular problems of control. The second part contains papers with the main theme of pattern recognition, which are basically papers using soft computing techniques for achieving pattern recognition in different applications. The third part contains papers with the themes of intelligent agents and social systems, which are papers that apply the ideas of agents and social behavior to solve real-world problems. The fourth part contains papers that deal with the hardware implementation of intelligent systems for solving particular problems. The fifth part contains papers that deal with modeling, simulation and optimization for real-world applications.

In this book, a new approach for diagnosis and risk evaluation of ar-terial hypertension is introduced. The new approach was implement-ed as a hybrid intelligent system combining modular neural net-works and fuzzy systems. The different responses of the hybrid system are combined using fuzzy logic. Finally, two genetic algo-rithms are used to perform the optimization of the modular neural networks parameters and fuzzy inference system parameters. The experimental results obtained using the proposed method on real pa-tient data show that when the optimization is used, the results can be better than without optimization. This book is intended to be a refer-ence for scientists and physicians interested in applying soft compu-ting techniques, such as neural networks, fuzzy logic and genetic algorithms, in medical diagnosis, but also in general to classification and pattern recognition and similar problems.

Bio-Inspired Hybrid Intelligent Systems for Image Analysis and Pattern Recognition comprises papers on diverse aspects of bio-inspired models, soft computing and hybrid intelligent systems. The articles are divided into four main parts. The first one consists of papers that propose new fuzzy and bio-inspired models to solve general problems. The second part deals with the main theme of modular neural networks in pattern recognition, which are basically papers using bio-inspired techniques. The third part contains papers that apply hybrid intelligent systems to the problem of time series analysis and prediction, while the fourth one shows papers dealing with bio-inspired models in optimization and robotics applications. An edited book in which both theoretical and application aspects are covered.