Henk Meuzelaar - Böcker

The past decade has witnessed major advances in our understanding of the chemical composition, structure, and reactivity of the complex organic-rich fossil matter known as "coal.

The Second Hidden Peak Symposium on Computer-Enhanced Analytical Spectroscopy, held in June, 1988, at the Snowbird Resort (Salt Lake City, Utah), centered around twelve keynote lectures delivered by some of the foremost experts and pioneers in this rapidly expanding field. The editor is highly indebted to each of these colleagues for contributing a chapter to the second volume of Computer-Enhanced Analytical Spec­ troscopy. The primary objective of this volume is to present a repre­ sentative cross-section of current activities in the field while balancing out the lighter coverage of some topics and areas in Volume 1. An exciting new topic, remote IR sensing, is covered in Chapters 4 and 5. Deconvolution and signal-processing methods have now been extended to UV/VIS (Chapter 1) and GC/MS (Chapter 3) applications. Furthermore, the development and testing of novel factor analysis techniques in the areas of UV /VIS and IR spectroscopy are discussed in Chapters 2 and 12, respectively. Fundamental aspects of library search techniques are presented in Chapters 7 (MS) and 9 (NMR). Chapters 6, 10, and 11 cover selected uses of expert systems in NMR, IR, and MS, respectively. Finally, an integrated expert system approach to the interpretation of GC/IR/MS data is outlined in Chapter 8. In an attempt to facilitate access to the various topics for the newcomer to the field, the twelve chapters have been organized into two main parts: Unsupervised Methods: Spectral Enhancement, Deconvolu­ tion, and Data Reduction, and Supervised Methods: Expert Systems, Modeling, and Quantitation.

June 1986 brought together some of the world's leaders in computer­ enhanced analytical spectroscopy at Snowbird, Utah, for what the attendees decided to call "The First Hidden Peak Symposium." With the remarkable advances in both computer hardware and software, it is interesting to observe that, while many computational aspects of spectroscopic analysis have become routine, some of the more fundamental problems remain unsolved. The group that assembled included many of those who started trying to interpret chemical spectroscopy when computers were ponderous, slow, and not very accessible, as well as newcomers who never knew the day that spectrometers were delivered without attached computers. The synergism was excellent. Many new ideas, as well as this volume, resulted from interactions among the participants. The conclusion was that progress would be made on more fundamen­ tal problems now that hardware, software, and mathematics were coming together on a more sophisticated level. The feeling was that the level of sophistication is now adequate and that it is only a matter of time before automated spectral interpretation surpasses all but the most advanced human experts.