We were very pleased to once again extend to the delegates and, we are pleased to th say, our friends the warmest of welcomes to the 8 International Conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems at Wellington - stitute of Technology in Wellington, New Zealand. The KES conferences attract a wide range of interest. The broad focus of the c- ference series is the theory and applications of computational intelligence and em- gent technologies. Once purely a research field, intelligent systems have advanced to the point where their abilities have been incorporated...