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We are glad to present the proceedings of the 5th biennial conference in the Intelligent Data Analysis series. The conference took place in Berlin, Germany, August 28–30, 2003. IDA has by now clearly grown up. Started as a small si- symposium of a larger conference in 1995 in Baden-Baden (Germany) it quickly attractedmoreinterest(bothsubmission-andattendance-wise),andmovedfrom London (1997) to Amsterdam (1999), and two years ago to Lisbon. Submission ratesalongwiththeeverimprovingqualityofpapershaveenabledtheor- nizers to assemble increasingly consistent and high-quality programs. This year we were again overwhelmed by yet another record-breaking submission rate of 180 papers. At the Program Chairs meeting we were – based on roughly 500 reviews – in the lucky position of carefully selecting 17 papers for oral and 42 for poster presentation. Poster presenters were given the opportunity to summarize their papers in 3-minute spotlight presentations. The oral, spotlight and poster presentations were then scheduled in a single-track, 2. 5-day conference program, summarized in this book. In accordance with the goal of IDA, “to bring together researchers from diverse disciplines,” we achieved a nice balance of presentations from the more theoreticalside(bothstatisticsandcomputerscience)aswellasmoreapplicati- oriented areas that illustrate how these techniques can be used in practice. Work presented in these proceedings ranges from theoretical contributions dealing, for example, with data cleaning and compression all the way to papers addressing practical problems in the areas of text classi?cation and sales-rate predictions. A considerable number of papers also center around the currently so popular applications in bioinformatics.

It is our pleasure to present the proceedings of Discovery Science 2008, the 11th International Conference on Discovery Science held in Budapest, Hungary, October 13-16, 2008. It was co-located with ALT 2008, the 19th International Conference on Algorithmic Learning Theory, whose proceedings are available in the twin volume LNAI 5254. This combination of DS and ALT conferences has been successfully organized each year since 2002. It provides a forum for the researchersworking on many di?erent aspects of scienti?c discovery. Indeed, ALT/DS 2008 covered both the possibility to automate part of the scienti?c discoveryandthenecessarysupporttothehumanprocessofdiscoveryinscience. Interestingly, this co-location also provided the opportunity for an exciting joint program of tutorials and invited talks. The number of submitted papers was 58, i.e., slightly more than the previous year. The Program Committee members were involved in a rigorous selection process based on three reviews per paper. At the end, we selected 26 long papers thanks to the recommendations of the experts based on relevance, novelty, signi?cance, technical quality, and clarity. Although some short papers were submitted, none of them was selected.

Weareproudtopresenttheproceedingsoftheseventhbiennialconferenceinthe Intelligent Data Analysis series. The conference took place in Ljubljana, Slo- nia, September 6-8, 2007. IDA continues to expand its scope, quality and size. It started as a small side-symposium as part of a larger conference in 1995 in Baden-Baden(Germany).It quickly attractedmoreinterest in both submissions and attendance as it moved to London (1997) and then Amsterdam (1999). The next three meetings were held in Lisbon (2001), Berlin (2003) and then Madrid in 2005. The improving quality of the submissions has enabled the organizers to assemble programs of ever-increasing consistency and quality. This year we madea rigorousselectionof33papersoutofalmost100submissions.Theresu- ing oral presentations were then scheduled in a single-track, two-and-a-half-day conference program, summarized in the book that you have before you. In accordance with the stated IDA goal of “bringing together researchers from diverse disciplines,” we believe we have achieved an excellent balance of presentationsfromthemoretheoretical–bothstatisticalandmachinelearning– to the more application-oriented areas that illustrate how these techniques can beusedinpractice.Forexample,theproceedingsincludepaperswiththeoretical contributions dealing with statistical approaches to sequence alignment as well as papers addressing practical problems in the areas of text classi?cation and medical data analysis. It is reassuring to see that IDA continues to bring such diverse areas together, thus helping to cross-fertilize these?elds.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Computational Life Sciences, CompLife 2006. The 25 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 56 initial submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on genomics, data mining, molecular simulation, molecular informatics, systems biology, biological networks/metabolism, and computational neuroscience.