Ten years ago the first International Symposium on Computer and Information Sciences (COINS-63) was held at Northwestern University. Since that time, computer and information sciences have witnessed a great intensification of research and education. The activities in this field have been significantly broadened and enriched. During this ten-year period, we have organized four COINS symposia to provide a forum for promoting com- munication among scientists, engineers, and educators in the computer and information science field and to act as a catalyzer for stimulating creative thinking within...

This volume, the eighth of a continuing series on information systems science, presents five timely topics which are of current interest in this growing field. In each chapter, an attempt is made to familiarize the reader with some basic background information on the advances discussed, so that this volume may be used independently or in conjunction with the previous volumes. The emphasis in this volume is centered upon file or ganization and performance evaluation, computational semantics, digital control, clustering analysis, and geometric modeling. Chapter I presents a comprehensive survey...