Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning (IDEAL) was initially a biennial forum dedicated to emerging and challenging topics in intelligent data analysis, knowledge discovery, and statistical and computational learning. The huge success of recent IDEAL conferences and the continuous growth of the ?eld have compelled it to become an annual conference after 2003. It is now a major international, interdisciplinary event covering subjects from data mining, inf- mation retrieval and management, autonomous learning, and agents to ?nancial engineering, neural networks, emerging learning paradigms and systems, bio- formatics, and pattern recognition. Data analysis and processing has become a common theme and plays a crucial role in many disciplines, especially in ?nance, biology, engineering, and information technology. Demand for intelligent met- dologies and tools is immense. The multidisciplinary nature of current research is pushing the traditional boundaries and bringing new ideas and solutions, and it is the way forward. This volume contains 164 refereed and ?nally accepted papers presented at the4thInternationalConferenceonIntelligentDataEngineeringandAutomated Learning (IDEAL 2003), held in Hong Kong, March 21 23, 2003. IDEAL 2003 received a record level of submissions, 321 in total, from all over the world. They were subsequently peer-reviewed by the Program Committee. The conference was held together with the 2003 IEEE International Conference on Computat- nal Intelligence for Financial Engineering at the modern and magni?cent Hong KongConventionandExhibitionCentre.

Autorentext
Dr. Jiming Liu is the Head of Computer Science Department at Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU). He leads the AAMAS/AOC Research Group (i.e., Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems / Autonomy-Oriented Computing) at HKBU. He holds a B.Sc. degree in Physics from East China Normal University in Shanghai, an M.A. degree in Educational Technology from Concordia University in Montreal, and an M.Eng. and a Ph.D. degrees both in Electrical Engineering from McGill University in Montreal. In Feb.-July 1999, Dr. Liu was an invited Visiting Scholar in Computer Science Department, Stanford University, where he was associated with the AI & Robotics Laboratory and taught advanced graduate classes on topics related to Robot Learning, Neural Robots, and Evolutionary Robotics. He is Guest Professor at University of Science and Technology of China, East China Normal University (Software Engineering Institute), and Beijing University of Technology, as well as Adjunct Fellow at E-Business Technology Institute (ETI - a joint partnership institute between IBM and University of Hong Kong). Dr. Liu is the co-founder of Web Intelligence Consortium (WIC), an international organization dedicated to promoting world-wide scientific research and industrial development in the era of Web and agent Intelligence. He has founded andserved, or is serving, as Program, Conference, Workshop, and General Chairs for several international conferences and workshops, including The IEEE/WIC International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI) series and The IEEE/WIC International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT) series, and is presently serving as the Senior Program Committee Member, Program Committee Member, and Steering/Planning Committee Member for many major international conferences.

Inhalt
Agents.- Automated Learning.- Bioinformatics.- Data Mining.- Financial Engineering.- Multimedia Information.