This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Visual Information Systems, VISUAL 2002, held in Hsin Chu, Taiwan, in March 2002.The 28 revised full papers presented together with one invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers are organized in topical sections on content-based indexing, search, and retrieval; visual information system architectures; image/video databases; networked video; and applications in various fields.

There has been rapid development in the area of adaptive computation over the past decade. The International Conference on Recent Advances in Adaptive Computation was held at Zhejiang University (Hangzhou, China) to explore these new directions. The conference brought together specialists to discuss modern theories and practical applications of adaptive methods. This volume contains articles reflecting the invited talks given by leading mathematicians at the conference. It is suitable for graduate students and researchers interested in methods of computation.