As information technologies (IT) become specialized and fragmented, it is easy to lose sight that many topics in IT have common threads and because of this, advances in one sub-discipline may transmit to another. The presentation of results between di?erent sub-disciplines of IT encourages this interchange for the advancement of IT as a whole. Of particular interest is the hybrid approach or combining ideas from one discipline with those of another to achieve a result that is more signi?cant than the sum of the individual parts. Through this hybrid philosophy, a new or common principle can be discovered which has the propensity to propagate throughout this multifaceted discipline. This volume comprises the selection of extended versions of papers that were presentedintheirshortenedformatthe2006InternationalConferenceonHybrid InformationTechnology(http://www.sersc.org/ICHIT2006/).Sixty-four papers out of the 235 that were published in ICHIT 2006 electronic proceedings were deemed suitable for inclusion in this volume, in a selection that was guided by technical quality and relevance to the balance of topics in hybrid information technology. The conference re?ected a change in the thinking of scientists and practitioners,whonowtendtojointheire?ortswithinmultidisciplinaryprojects. As a consequence, the readers may observe that many papers might conceivably be classi?ed into more than one chapter, given their interdisciplinary scope. The contributions in this monograph are clustered into six chapters: Data Analysis, Modeling, and Learning (11 papers); Imaging, Speech, and Complex Data (11 papers); Applications of Arti?cial Intelligence (11 papers); Hybrid, Smart, and UbiquitousSystems(11papers);HardwareandSoftwareEngineering(9papers); as well as Networking and Telecommunications (11 papers).
