As well as a selection of extended peer-reviewed papers from the 4th International IEEE Conference on Intelligent Systems, this volume is complemented by relevant work from leading figures who did not attend, and covers virtually all aspects of IS development.
In the modern science and technology there are some research directions and ch- lenges which are at the forefront of world wide research activities because of their relevance. This relevance may be related to different aspects. First, from a point of view of researchers it can be implied by just an analytic or algorithmic difficulty in the solution of problems within an area. From a broader perspective, this re- vance can be related to how important problems and challenges in a particular area are to society, corporate or national competitiveness, etc. Needless to say that the latter, more global challenges are probably more decisive a driving force for s- ence seen from a global perspective. One of such meta-challenges in the present world is that of intelligent s- tems. For a long time it has been obvious that the complexity of our world and the speed of changes we face in virtually all processes that have impact on our life imply a need to automate many tasks and processes that have been so far limited to human beings because they require some sort of intelligence.
