Computer and Information Science

This collection gathers extended and revised versions of 23 papers first presented at two 2008 events: the 7th IEEE/ACIS International Conference on Computer and Information Science (ICIS 2008) and the 2nd IEEE/ACIS International Workshop on e-Activity (IWEA 2008). Both gatherings took place in Portland, Oregon, in May 2008. Their aim was to draw researchers, practitioners, users and students into a shared forum for exchanging experiences and new findings across the field, covering theory, applications and tools, as well as the practical obstacles encountered and the remedies used to overcome them.

The volume came about after one of its editors contacted in-house editor Dr. Thomas Ditzinger in January 2008 about publishing stronger, expanded versions of selected conference and workshop papers. With his approval, the organizers chose the 23 papers included here. The book appears in Springer's Studies in Computational Intelligence series.

The opening chapters show the range of topics. Fabio Perez Marzullo and co-authors describe a model driven architecture (MDA) method for evaluating database performance, using a profiling technique that can reveal flaws while software is being built. Huy Nguyen Anh Pham and Evangelos Triantaphyllou propose a new way to test classification algorithms, illustrated through an analysis of the Pima Indian diabetes dataset, a widely used benchmark. Their Homogeneity-Based Algorithm (HBA) is designed to manage overfitting and overgeneralization, problems that earlier methods had struggled with on that dataset.