The main objective of the annual International Conference on Intelligent Technologies (InTech) is to bring together researchers and practitioners who implement intelligent and fuzzy technologies in real-world environment. The Sixth International Conference on Intelligent Technologies InTech was held in Phuket, Thailand, on December 14-16, 2005. Topics of InTech'05 included mathematical foundations of intelligent technologies, traditional Artificial Intelligent techniques, uncertainty processing and methods of soft computing, learning/adaptive systems/data mining, and applications of intelligent technologies. This special issue contains extended versions of 11 selected papers originally presented at InTech'05. These papers cover most of the topics of the conference. Several papers describe intelligent applications of traditional data processing and signal processing techniques. H. Sawada et al. use advanced signal processing techniques to separate it sounds coming from different directions and thus, to enable user to it control robots by voice in noisy environments. N. Theera-Umpon uses a techniques of selecting a Region of Interest to enhance the behavior of the signal processing techniques when it detecting buried landmines. N. Shigei et al. describe innovative vector quantization technique which improve it image compression. T. A. Duong et al. use entropy approach to automatically it detect different it chemicals in the air. A few papers describe new applications of fuzzy and computing-with-words techniques. J. Han et al. describe how fuzzy it clustering techniques can be enhanced when we take into account that different factors may have different importance and thus, must be taken with different weights. J. Y. Zhang et al. show how fuzzy techniques – specifically, fuzzy causal models – can improve the efficiency of computer systems for it e-commerce. I. Kobayashi et al. use a new techniques (similar to computing with words) that helps to it personalize help for software users. Several papers take into account that in real life, knowledge is it hierarchical, and decision making and control are also hierarchical. T. H. Tran et al. show how a hierarchical combination of PID control with sliding-mode controllers can lead to robust non-overshoot high quality it control. L. Ding describes general challenges and ideas related to the need to take into account the hierarchical character of our knowledge. Finally, two papers deal with radically new approaches to intelligent data processing. Y. Murai et al. propose a new efficient method of it representing objects in space, a method in which an object A is described by “distance field” d(x) – describing the distance from an arbitrary point x to this object A. K. Akama et al. describe a new general computation model that is extremely useful in it checking program correctness. We want to thank all the authors for their outstanding work, the participants of InTech'05 for their helpful suggestions, the anonymous reviewers for their thorough analysis and constructive help, and – last but not the least – to Professor Kaoru Hirota for his kind suggestion to host this issue and to the entire staff of the journal for their tireless work.
Social Work and the Development of Community-Based Social Services
