Featuring international contributors from both industry and academia, Numerical Methods for Finance explores new and relevant numerical methods for the solution of practical problems in finance. It is one of the few books entirely devoted to numerical methods as applied to the financial field. Presenting state-of-the-art methods in this area

Scientists from management and strategy, information systems, engineering and telecommunications have discussed a novel concept: Smart Business Networks. They see the future as a developing web of people and organizations, bound together in a dynamic and unpredictable way, creating smart outcomes from quickly (re-)configuring links between actors. The question is: What should be done to make the outcomes of such a network 'smart', that is, just a little better than that of your competitor? More agile, with less pain, with more return to all the members of the network, now and over time? The technical answer is to create a 'business operating system' that should run business processes on different organisational platforms. Business processes would become portable: The end-to-end management of processes running across many different organizations in many different forms would become possible. This book presents you the outcomes of an energizing and new direction in management science.

Recent years have seen the widespread application of Natural Computing algorithms (broadly defined in this context as computer algorithms whose design draws inspiration from phenomena in the natural world) for the purposes of financial modelling and optimisation. A related stream of work has also seen the application of learning mechanisms drawn from Natural Computing algorithms for the purposes of agent-based modelling in finance and economics. In this book we have collected a series of chapters which illustrate these two faces of Natural Computing. The first part of the book illustrates how algorithms inspired by the natural world can be used as problem solvers to uncover and optimise financial models. The second part of the book examines a number agent-based simulations of financial systems. This book follows on from Natural Computing in Computational Finance (Volume 100 in Springer’s Studies in Computational Intelligence series) which in turn arose from the success of EvoFIN 2007, the very first European Workshop on Evolutionary Computation in Finance & Economics held in Valencia, Spain in April 2007.

The three volume set LNAI 4251, LNAI 4252, and LNAI 4253 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems, KES 2006, held in Bournemouth, UK, in October 2006. The 480 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from about 1400 submissions. The papers present a wealth of original research results from the field of intelligent information processing.

Data mining applications range from commercial to social domains, with novel applications appearing swiftly; for example, within the context of social networks. The expanding application sphere and social reach of advanced data mining raise pertinent issues of privacy and security. Present-day data mining is a progressive multidisciplinary endeavor. This inter- and multidisciplinary approach is well reflected within the field of information systems. The information systems research addresses software and hardware requirements for supporting computationally and data-intensive applications. Furthermore, it encompasses analyzing system and data aspects, and all manual or automated activities. In that respect, research at the interface of information systems and data mining has significant potential to produce actionable knowledge vital for corporate decision-making. The aim of the proposed volume is to provide a balanced treatment of the latest advances and developments in data mining; in particular, exploring synergies at the intersection with information systems. It will serve as a platform for academics and practitioners to highlight their recent achievements and reveal potential opportunities in the field. Thanks to its multidisciplinary nature, the volume is expected to become a vital resource for a broad readership ranging from students, throughout engineers and developers, to researchers and academics.

The 16th annual International Conference on the Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2010) was held in St. Andrews, Scotland, during September 6–10, 2010. We would like to thank our sponsors for their generous support of this event. This conference is concerned with all aspects of computing with constraints, including:theory,algorithms,applications,environments,languages,modelsand systems. We received a wide variety of submissions, each of which was reviewed by at least three referees. Referees were chosen for each submission by an initial bidding process where Program Committee members chose papers from their area of interest. The range of expertise represented by the large Program C- mittee meant that almost all submissions were reviewed by subject experts on the Program Committee, or by colleagues chosen by members of the Program Committee for their particular expertise. Papers weresolicitedeither as long (15 page), or short (8 page) submissions. Short-paper submissions were refereed to exactly the same high standards as long-paper submissions but naturally were expected to contain a smaller quantity of new material. Thus there is no disti- tion in these proceedings between short and long papers. I used the excellent EasyChair conference management system to support this process of reviewing, and for the collation and organization of these proceedings. Submissions were made either to the applications track or to the research track. Therewere101(23short)researchtracksubmissionsofwhich36(8short) wereaccepted,whichisa36%(35%ofshort)acceptancerate. Applicationstrack submissions received special consideration and the acceptance rate was sign- cantly higher than for the research track.

Annotation The three volume set LNCS 3610, LNCS 3611, and LNCS 3612 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on Natural Computation, ICNC 2005, held in Changsha, China, in August 2005 jointly with the Second International Conference on Fuzzy Systems and Knowledge Discovery FSKD 2005 (LNAI volumes 3613 and 3614). The program committee selected 313 carefully revised full papers and 189 short papers for presentation in three volumes from 1887 submissions. The first volume includes all the contributions related to learning algorithms and architectures in neural networks, neurodynamics, statistical neural network models and support vector machines, and other topics in neural network models; cognitive science, neuroscience informatics, bioinformatics, and bio-medical engineering, and neural network applications as communications and computer networks, expert system and informatics, and financial engineering. The second volume concentrates on neural network applications such as pattern recognition and diagnostics, robotics and intelligent control, signal processing and multi-media, and other neural network applications; evolutionary learning, artificial immune systems, evolutionary theory, membrane, molecular, DNA computing, and ant colony systems. The third volume deals with evolutionary methodology, quantum computing, swarm intelligence and intelligent agents; natural computation applications as bioinformatics and bio-medical engineering, robotics and intelligent control, and other applications of natural computation; hardware implementations of natural computation, and fuzzy neural systems as well as soft computing.