Local search has been applied successfully to a diverse collection of optimization problems. However, results are scattered throughout the literature. This is the first book that presents a large collection of theoretical results in a consistent manner. It provides the reader with a coherent overview of the achievements obtained so far, and serves as a source of inspiration for the development of novel results in the challenging field of local search.

The rapid growth in electronic systems in the past decade has boosted research in the area of computational intelligence. As it has become increasingly easy to generate, collect, transport, process, and store huge amounts of data, the role of intelligent algorithms has become prominent in order to visualize, manipulate, retrieve, and interpret the data. For instance, intelligent search techniques have been developed to search for relevant items in huge collections of web pages, and data mining and interpretation techniques play a very important role in making sense out of huge amounts of biomolecular measurements. As a result, the added value of many modern systems is no longer determined by hardware only, but increasingly by the intelligent software that supports and facilitates the user in realizing his or her objectives. This book is the outcome of a series of discussions at the Philips Symposium on Intelligent Algorithms,

The advent of the digital era, the Internet, and the development of fast com puting devices that can access mass storage servers at high communication bandwidths have brought within our reach the world of ambient intelligent systems. These systems provide users with information, communication, and entertainment at any desired place and time. Since its introduction in 1998, the vision of Ambient Intelligence has attracted much attention within the re search community. Especially, the need for intelligence generated by smart al gorithms, which run on digital platforms that are integrated into consumer elec tronics devices, has strengthened the interest in Computational Intelligence. This newly developing research field, which can be positioned at the inter section of computer science, discrete mathematics, and artificial intelligence, contains a large variety of interesting topics including machine learning, con tent management, vision, speech, data mining, content augmentation, profiling, contextual awareness, feature extraction, resource management, security, and privacy."

This book is the outcome of a series of discussions at the Philips Symposium on Intelligent Algorithms, held in Eindhoven in December 2004. It offers exciting and practical examples of the use of intelligent algorithms in ambient and biomedical computing. It contains topics such as bioscience computing, database design, machine consciousness, scheduling, video summarization, audio classification, semantic reasoning, machine learning, tracking and localization, secure computing, and communication.

Local search has been applied successfully to a diverse collection of optimization problems. However, results are scattered throughout the literature. This is the first book that presents a large collection of theoretical results in a consistent manner. It provides the reader with a coherent overview of the achievements obtained so far, and serves as a source of inspiration for the development of novel results in the challenging field of local search.

The advent of the digital era, the Internet, and the development of fast com puting devices that can access mass storage servers at high communication bandwidths have brought within our reach the world of ambient intelligent systems. These systems provide users with information, communication, and entertainment at any desired place and time. Since its introduction in 1998, the vision of Ambient Intelligence has attracted much attention within the re search community. Especially, the need for intelligence generated by smart al gorithms, which run on digital platforms that are integrated into consumer elec tronics devices, has strengthened the interest in Computational Intelligence. This newly developing research field, which can be positioned at the inter section of computer science, discrete mathematics, and artificial intelligence, contains a large variety of interesting topics including machine learning, con tent management, vision, speech, data mining, content augmentation, profiling, contextual awareness, feature extraction, resource management, security, and privacy."