Advances in Hybrid Information Technology

As information technologies (IT) become specialized and fragmented, it is easy to lose sight that many topics in IT have common threads and because of this, advances in one sub-discipline may transmit to another. The presentation of results between di?erent sub-disciplines of IT encourages this interchange for the advancement of IT as a whole. Of particular interest is the hybrid approach or combining ideas from one discipline with those of another to achieve a result that is more signi?cant than the sum of the individual parts. Through this hybrid philosophy, a new or common principle can be discovered which has the propensity to propagate throughout this multifaceted discipline. This volume comprises the selection of extended versions of papers that were presentedintheirshortenedformatthe2006InternationalConferenceonHybrid InformationTechnology(http://www.sersc.org/ICHIT2006/).Sixty-four papers out of the 235 that were published in ICHIT 2006 electronic proceedings were deemed suitable for inclusion in this volume, in a selection that was guided by technical quality and relevance to the balance of topics in hybrid information technology. The conference re?ected a change in the thinking of scientists and practitioners,whonowtendtojointheire?ortswithinmultidisciplinaryprojects. As a consequence, the readers may observe that many papers might conceivably be classi?ed into more than one chapter, given their interdisciplinary scope. The contributions in this monograph are clustered into six chapters: Data Analysis, Modeling, and Learning (11 papers); Imaging, Speech, and Complex Data (11 papers); Applications of Arti?cial Intelligence (11 papers); Hybrid, Smart, and UbiquitousSystems(11papers);HardwareandSoftwareEngineering(9papers); as well as Networking and Telecommunications (11 papers).