Francisco Cervantes-Perez – författare

The Central Nervous System can be considered as an aggregate of neurons specialized in both the transmission and transfomation of information. Information here has been used for many purposes, but the most important one is probably to generate a representation of the "extenal" world that allows the organism to react properly to changes in its extenal environment. These functions range from such basic ones as detection of changes that may lead to tissue damage and eventual destruction of the organism and the implementation of avoidance reactions to more elaborate representations of the extemal world implying recognition of shapes, sounds and textures as the basis of planned action or even reflection. The question is, how can we hope to understand the complexity inherent in this range of functionalities? One of the distinguishing features of the last two decades has been the availability of computational power that has impacted the many areas of science concerned with this question.An effort has been made within this book to cross boundaries and to have active scientists from different backgrounds and disciplines explain the basic principles which guide their investigations with the hope that this will lay the basis for a future collaborative effort to understand the principles of neural networks.

Intelligent Decision-Making Support Systems (i-DMSS) are specialized IT-based systems that support some or several phases of the individual, team, organizational or inter-organizational decision making process by deploying some or several intelligent mechanisms. This book pursues the following academic aims: (i) generate a compendium of quality theoretical and applied contributions in Intelligent Decision-Making Support Systems (i-DMSS) for engineering and management IT-based service systems (ITSS); (ii)  diffuse scarce knowledge about foundations, architectures and effective and efficient methods and strategies for successfully planning, designing, building, operating, and evaluating i-DMSS for ITSS, and (iii) create an awareness of, and a bridge between ITSS and i-DMSS academicians and practitioners in the current complex and dynamic engineering and management ITSS organizational. The book presents a collection of 11 chapters referring to relevant topics for both IT service systems and i-DMSS including: problems of selection of IT service providers, optimization of supply chain systems, IT governance decisions, clinical decision support, dynamic user-interface adaptation, re-engineering of processes, and generic decision problems. Advanced IT technologies used in some chapters are:  fuzzy multi-criteria mechanisms, semantic processing, data mining processing, and rough sets. Other chapters report traditional DSS mechanisms but used or suggested to be used in innovative mode for IT service engineering and management tasks.

The Central Nervous System can be considered as an aggregate of neurons specialized in both the transmission and transformation of information. Information can be used for many purposes, but probably the most important one is to generate a representation of the "external" world that allows the organism to react properly to changes in its external environment. These functions range from such basic ones as detection of changes that may lead to tissue damage and eventual destruction of the organism and the implementation of avoidance reactions, to more elaborate representations of the external world implying recognition of shapes, sounds and textures as the basis of planned action or even reflection. Some of these functions confer a clear survival advantage to the organism (prey or mate recognition, escape reactions, etc. ). Others can be considered as an essential part of cognitive processes that contribute, to varying degrees, to the development of individuality and self-consciousness. How can we hope to understand the complexity inherent in this range of functionalities? One of the distinguishing features of the last two decades has been the availability of computational power that has impacted many areas of science. In neurophysiology, computation is used for experiment control, data analysis and for the construction of models that simulate particular systems. Analysis of the behavior of neuronal networks has transcended the limits of neuroscience and is now a discipline in itself, with potential applications both in the neural sciences and in computing sciences.