Advances in Natural Computation Part 03

This book and its sister volumes, i. e. , LNCS vols. 3610, 3611, and 3612, are the proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Natural Computation (ICNC 2005), jointly held with the 2nd International Conference on Fuzzy S- tems and Knowledge Discovery (FSKD 2005, LNAI vols. 3613 and 3614) from 27 to 29 August 2005 in Changsha, Hunan, China. In its budding run, ICNC 2005successfullyattracted1887submissionsfrom32countries/regions(thejoint ICNC-FSKD 2005 received 3136 submissions). After rigorous reviews, 502 hi- quality papers, i. e. , 313 long papers and 189 short papers, were included in the ICNC 2005 proceedings, representing an acceptance rate of 26. 6%. The ICNC-FSKD 2005 featured the most up-to-date researchresults in c- putational algorithms inspired from nature, including biological, ecological, and physical systems. It is an exciting and emerging interdisciplinary area in which a wide rangeof techniques and methods arebeing studied for dealing with large, complex, and dynamic problems. The joint conferences also promoted cro- fertilization over these exciting and yet closely-related areas, which had a s- ni?cant impact on the advancement of these important technologies. Speci?c areas included neural computation, quantum computation, evolutionary c- putation, DNA computation, chemical computation, information processing in cells and tissues, molecular computation, computation with words, fuzzy c- putation, granular computation, arti?cial life, swarm intelligence, ants colonies, arti?cial immune systems, etc. , with innovative applications to knowledge d- covery, ?nance, operations research, and more. In addition to the large number ofsubmitted papers,wewereblessedwiththepresenceoffourrenownedkeynote speakers and several distinguished panelists.