Published in honour of the 70th birthday of Yoh-Han Pao, George S. Dively Dis- tinguished Professor of Engineering at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, this festschrift embraces a remarkably diverse set of topics. Drawing from the fields of pattern recognition, engineering, artificial intelligence and artificial neural systems, it is a fitting testament to the extraordinary breadth of his professional in- terests both in foundational research into the new technology of Intelligent Systems and ill the application of that evolving technology to the solution of hard engineering...