For this book, the editors invited and called for contributions from indispensable research areas relevant to "chance discovery," which has been defined as the discovery of events significant for making a decision, and studied since 2000. From respective research areas as artificial intelligence, mathematics, cognitive science, medical science, risk management, methodologies for design and communication, the invited and selected authors in this book present their particular approaches to chance discovery. The chapters here show contributions to identifying rare or hidden events and explaining their significance, predicting future trends, communications for scenario development in marketing and design, identification effects and side-effects of medicines, etc. The methods presented in this book are based on the interaction of human, machine, and human's living environment, rather than based purely automated predictions of the future. This is a promising direction of computer-supported decision of human in a radically changing environment.

This book collects selected papers by authors for CODATA 2006, which are relevant to the acquisition of knowledge and the assessment of risk and opportunity that comes from combining data from a number of different disciplines.

Data Mining for Design and Marketing shows how to design and integrate data mining tools into human thinking processes in order to make better business decisions, especially in designing and marketing products and systems.The expert contributors discuss how data mining can identify valuable consumer patterns, which aid marketers and designers in de

Chance discovery means discovering chances - the breaking points in systems, the marketing windows in business, etc. It involves determining the significance of some piece of information about an event and then using this new knowledge in decision making. The techniques developed combine data mining methods for finding rare but important events with knowledge management, groupware, and social psychology. The reader will find many applications, such as finding information on the Internet, recognizing changes in customer behavior, detecting the first signs of an imminent earthquake, etc. This first book dedicated to chance discovery covers the state of the art in the theory and methods and examines typical scenarios, and it thus appeals to researchers working on new techniques and algorithms and also to professionals dealing with real-world applications.

Since year 2000, scientists on artificial and natural intelligences started to study chance discovery - methods for discovering events/situations that significantly affect decision making. Partially because the editors Ohsawa and Abe are teaching at schools of Engineering and of Literature with sharing the interest in chance discovery, this book reflects interdisciplinary aspects of progress: First, as an interdisciplinary melting pot of cognitive science, computational intelligence, data mining/visualization, collective intelligence, ... etc, chance discovery came to reach new application domains e.g. health care, aircraft control, energy plant, management of technologies, product designs, innovations, marketing, finance etc. Second, basic technologies and sciences including sensor technologies, medical sciences, communication technologies etc. joined this field and interacted with cognitive/computational scientists in workshops on chance discovery, to obtain breakthroughs by stimulating each other. Third, “time” came to be introduced explicitly as a significant variable ruling causalities - background situations causing chances and chances causing impacts on events and actions of humans in the future. Readers may urge us to list the fourth, fifth, sixth, ... but let us stop here and open this book.

This proceeding contains the cutting-edge research results in information science and technology, and their related technology. Recent scientific breakthroughs such as invisibility cloak and meta-materials, data mining techniques, advanced game playing in artificial intelligence, nano-technology, unlikely event probability, and fuzzy logic reasoning are just a few outstanding examples. Walter Freeman's 80th birthday celebration is another highlight of this proceedings, because this major event is attended by many leading scientists from around the world. Key speakers include Charles Falco, Water Freeman, Thomas Huang, Meyya Meyyappan, Lotfi Zadeh, Bernette Bouchon Meunier, Heather Carlson, Ling Guan, Etienne Kerre and John Mordes.

This book presents a powerful method for innovation that reinforces combinatorial and analogical thoughts, with interdisciplinary communications among stakeholders in the market. In this method called Innovators' Marketplace, two games - Innovators' Market Game and Analogy Game - accelerate the spiral of innovation with visualizing data on the connectivity of pieces of existing knowledge. Some players invent ideas by connecting and combining pre-existing knowledge, while others evaluate the ideas to decide whether or not to buy. In a joyful atmosphere created by the games, players look beyond resistance to criticism, as experiments real cases show. They will start thinking and talking about the best segment of the majority, latent requirements in the future market, and scenarios for satisfying those requirements. This process embodies the principle that an interdisciplinary combination of business actors and resources, possibly with the appearance of new actors, triggers innovation.