Knowledge and Information Systems 1 (1999) 1-3
Knowledge and Information Systems
© Springer-Verlag 1999
Editorial Welcome to the premiere issue of Knowledge and Information Systems (KAIS)! This quarterly peer-reviewed journal provides an international forum for researchers and professionals to share their knowledge and report new advances on all topics related to knowledge systems and advanced information systems, including their theoretical foundations, infrastructure, and enabling technologies. The study of knowledge and information processing has now matured to a multi-disciplinary area that spans many applications and research communities. Vendors in electronic commerce routinely manage their on-line inventory databases with facilities to process temporal and spatial information. Application designers utilize data warehousing and knowledge discovery techniques to mine product databases in order to provide decision support for predicting market trends. Internet users employ intelligent information retrieval methods to access on-line digital libraries and the World Wide Web. Software engineers design software cooperatively using components and specifications stored in distributed databases. Developers of human-machine interfaces use knowledge in visualization, hypertext, hypermedia, and multimedia. Techniques in soft computing, evolutionary computing, learning, adaptation, uncertainty management, and agents are actively studied in the design of high performance computer systems, distributed intelligent systems, and mobile systems. Emerging applications, like biomedicine, geographical information processing, and electronic commerce, are prime targets for applying new knowledge and information processing techniques. This journal seeks to bridge the gap between theory and practice in knowledge and information processing. In addition to publishing original high-quality research papers, we also publish critical review papers that survey the state of the art, and papers on vision and directions that discuss industry trends, government funding, and emerging focus . Each paper goes through a thorough review process in order to ensure its quality. Interested authors should refer to the submission guidelines on the journal home page (http://kais .mines. edu/",kais/) and at the end of this issue. We are very fortunate to have a distinguished ,b oard of Editors and Associate Editors, who are well known in their respective areas. We would like to thank our three regional Editors, Nabil R. Adam (North and South America), John A. Barnden (Europe) and Ning Zhong (Asia and Australasia) and all our Associate Editors for their help, advice and comments. All of them have also pledged to process submitted papers with a short turnaround time in order to ensure their timeliness.
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This premiere issue has four regular and two short papers. Its main theme, Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, is an emerging research area that integrates methods from several fields, including machine learning, statistics, pattern recognition, artificial intelligence, and database systems, for the analysis of large volumes of data. We are indebted to the members of the editorial board, the authors, and the reviewers who worked hard to put this first issue together. Benjamin W. Wah Coordinated Science Laboratory, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1308 West Main Street, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA E-mail:
[email protected]
Xindong Wu Department of Mathematical and Computer Sciences, Colorado School of Mines, 1500 Illinois Street, Golden, Colorado 80401, USA E-mail:
[email protected]
Benjamin W. Wah received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1979. He is currently the Robert T. Chien Professor of Engineering and a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Coordinated Science Laboratory, and the Beckman Institute of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, USA. During 1998-99, he serves as a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Chinese University of Hong Kong. Previously, he served on the faculty of Purdue University (1979-85), as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation (1988-89), as Fujitsu Visiting Chair Professor of Intelligence Engineering, University of Tokyo (1992), and McKay Visiting Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley (1994) . In 1989, he was awarded a University Scholar of the University of Illinois, and in 1998, he received the IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award. Wah's current research interests are in the areas of nonlinear search and optimization, knowledge engineering, multimedia signal processing, and parallel and distributed processing. Wah was the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering between 1993-1996, and is the Honorary Editor-in-Chief of Knowledge and Information Systems. He currently serves on the editorial boards of Information Sciences, International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools, and Journal of VLSI Signal Processing. He has chaired a number of international conferences and is currently serving as the International Program Committee Chair of the IFIP World· Congress in 2000. He has served in the IEEE Computer Society in various capacities and is currently the elected First Vice President for Publications. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the Society for Design and Process Science. Xindong Wu is an Associate Professor in Applied Computer Science at the Colorado School of Mines, USA. Before joining the Colorado School of Mines in August 1998, he was a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Monash University from December 1994 to July 1998, and a Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at James Cook University from July 1993 to November 1994. He holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh, and is a Senior Member of the IEEE. Since 1987, Wu has published extensively in the areas of
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data mining and knowledge-based systems, including a research book titled Knowledge Acquisition from Databases published by Ablex (USA) in 1995, and over 70 refereed papers in various journals and conference proceedings. Wu is the Executive Editor of Knowledge and Information Systems, and an editor / associate editor/consulting editor/editorial board member for four other journals including Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery. He was a program chair/co-chair for the 1997 IEEE Knowledge and Data Engineering Exchange Workshop (KDEX-97) and the 1998 Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD98), and has served on the program committees of over 20 international conferences including the 1995 and 1996 International Conferences on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. He is currently Chair of the Steering Committee of the annual PacificAsia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.
