Client/server applications are of increasing importance in industry; they are a significant first step towards a global distributed processing model. A very recent response to this trend is the Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) of the Open Software Foundation (OSF), the emerging new industry standard for distributed processing. The papers in this volume discuss the client/server approach based on DCE, illustrating and analyzing the functionality of important DCE components and applications. A number of contributions also focus on new models beyond traditional client/server processing and beyond DCE. The papers in this volume were presented at the International Workshop on the OSF Distributed Computing Environment, held in Karlsruhe, Germany, October 7-8, 1993. Following an introductory chapter, the contributions are grouped into parts on DCE analysis and comparison, application support, methods and tools, RPC extensions, and object-based systems.

Client/Server applications are of increasing importance in industry, and have been improved by advanced distributed object-oriented techniques, dedicated tool support and both multimedia and mobile computing extensions. Recent responses to this trend are standardized distributed platforms and models including the Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) of the Open Software Foundation (OS F), Open Distributed Processing (ODP), and the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) of the Object Management Group (OMG). These proceedings are the compilation of papers from the technical stream of the IFIPIIEEE International Conference on Distributed Platforms, Dresden, Germany. This conference has been sponsored by IFIP TC6.1, by the IEEE Communications Society, and by the German Association of Computer Science (GI -Gesellschaft fur Informatik). ICDP'96 was organized jointly by Dresden University of Technology and Aachen University of Technology. It is closely related to the International Workshop on OSF DCE in Karlsruhe, 1993, and to the IFIP International Conference on Open Distributed Processing. ICDP has been designed to bring together researchers and practitioners who are studying and developing new methodologies, tools and technologies for advanced client/server environ ments, distributed systems, and network applications based on distributed platforms.

This volume contains the papers presented at the Intemational Conference on Object Oriented Information Systems 00lS'94, held at South Bank University, London, December 19 - 21, 1994. In response to our call for papers, a total 85 papers from 24 different countries were submitted. Each paper was evaluated by at least two Program Committee members and an additional reviewer. Together, we selected 41 papers for presentation at the conference and inclusion in the Proceedings. Also included are the keynote addresses by Peter Gray and Michael Jackson. The other submissions were recommended for presentation in the poster sessions. Peter Gray, our invited speaker, evaluates the problems of object-oriented systems and data independence by looking at how object oriented database applications are failing to perceive its benefits, and instead rely too much on encapsulation. He suggests alternative kinds of object storage to preserve data independence. The second invited speaker, Michael Jackson describes a way of solving problems, by focusing directly on the problems themselves, their components and structures and on the relationships between the problem and the solution method. He discusses a particular view of the role of object-orientation in software development.

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.