Applied intelligent systems (editorial)

Intelligent systems research, development, and application shows the potential of becoming the primary area of interest among academics and practitioners in our knowledge-based society of the 21st century. Today, most of the processes of modern industries (manufacturing, servicing, IT, transportation, etc.) include an “intelligent component,” where intelligence is generally understood as an ability to act properly in a new situation. This fact creates enormous challenges for engineering and management in the new millennium. To address some of these challenges, the conference series titled Industrial, Engineering & Other Applications of Applied Intelligent Systems was established with the aim of presenting to the community the results of original research or innovative practical applications of state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence (AI) I methodologies and techniques. Its twenty-first edition was held June 18-20, 2008 in Wroclaw, Poland. For more details, please visit the conference series Web site at http://www.iea-aie.pwr.wroc.pl/. This important international event attracted papers in a number of relevant areas such as mining, control, design, manufacturing, bio-informatics, vision, search, robotics, education, management, planning, scheduling, reasoning, and many more. This special edition of Cybernetics and Systems contains carefully selected and peer reviewed papers that expand significantly on those topics of the conference that may be of interest to the cybernetics and systems community