This volume contains papers presented at the 8th International Conference on Modeling Decisions for Artificial Intelligence (MDAI 2011), held in Changsha, China, July 28-30. This conference followed MDAI 2004 (Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain),MDAI 2005 (Tsukuba, Japan),MDAI 2006 (Tarragona,Catalonia, Spain), MDAI 2007 (Kitakyushu,...

Systems analysis and design (SAND) has been the central field of research and education in the area of management information systems (MIS) or, as it is called more frequently in Europe, business informatics, almost from the time of its origins. SAND continuously attracts the attention of both academia and business. The rapid progress...

When people speak of Ruby web development, it has historically been in reference to the opinionated juggernaut that is Rails. This is certainly not an unfounded association; Hulu, Yellow Pages, Twitter, and countless others have relied on Rails to power their (often massive) web presences, and Rails facilitates that process with zeal....

It was a real pleasure to have taken part in organizing the 10th International Conference on Cryptography and Network Security (CANS 2011). It was held during December 10–12, 2011, at the International Asia Pacific Convention Center in Sanya, on the subtropical island of Hainan (China). CANS 2011 was sponsored by the National...

Financial cryptography and data security (FC) is a well-established international forum for research, advanced development,...

The workshop attracted a record number of 148 submissions from 29 countries, of which the...

This volume collects the proceedings of two related international conferences on foundations and practical applications of mathematical methods of data analysis, of Formal Concept Analysis and of methods for information extraction from natural language texts. The first conference, named Knowledge - Ontology - Theory 2007 (KONT 2007),...

This book is really the end product of over a decade of work, on and off, on diagrammatic reasoning in artificial intelligence (AI). In developing this book, I drew inspiration from a variety of sources: two experimental studies, the development of two prototype systems, an extensive literature review and analysis in AI,...

The 12th International Conference on the Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2006) was held in Nantes, France, September 24–29, 2006. Information about the conference can be found on theWeb at http://www.sciences. univ-nantes.fr/cp06/. Information about past conferences in the series can be found at...