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International Journal of Information Technology Vol. 11 No. 11 2005 (Special Issue) Guest Editorial Special Issue on Automatic Control and Information Automatic control and information fusion often involve substantial data processing and computation at both design and implementation stages. It is no surprise that we have seen many contributions representing a large variety of research activities from the field at the 2005 International Conference on Intelligent Computing (ICIC’05) held on August 23-26, 2005, in Hefei, China. In this special issue, 15 papers have been selected from the ICIC’05 which are in one way or another concerned with the subject of intelligent computing in control and information fusion in the following four general areas. In particular, the selected papers have shown how the automatic control methodologies can be fused with intelligent data processing techniques. Because of the diversity of the papers, it is difficult to go through in this editorial how the synthesis is achieved in each contribution and only a brief description is provided below to summarize the work of the papers. Robotics: The special issue has selected four papers that tackle various issues related to robotics. Xu, Hu, Calderon and Tan present a motion planning method for trajectory tracking of a mobile manipulator with redundant degrees of freedom. Chen, Zhang and Wang propose a novel formation control for autonomous mobile robots based on flexible feedback linearization and optimal approximate target algorithms. Deng, Yi and Zhao investigate two-stage path planner by integrating probabilistic roadmap and simulated annealing. Finally, Zhang, Zuo, Gong and Ruan present us a novel growing cognitive model of motor balance skill for the balance control of Robot agent. Advanced control of power, energy and mechanical systems: The conference has also seen a lot of industrial applications, including mechanical, power and energy system control. The selected papers include a new position control method of PMSM proposed by Dong, Sun, Lei and Yun; a full digital control design to implement the vector control of a cycloconverter-fed salient synchronous machine designed by Yu, Zhang and Fan; a Mind-Evolution-Based Machine Learning (MEBML) method for model and control of jig in coal preparing plant investigated by Ma and Liu; and a fuzzy and adaptive control of grinding process researched by Li, Ye, Jiang and Wang. Information Processing and Fusion. Information processing and fusion is a very active research area and this issue collects four papers in this field. Gan, Zhou and Li introduce an improved Principal Components Analysis (PCA) method for face recognition; Deng, Jin, Zhen and Huang propose a facial expression recognition system based on Gabor feature using a novel local Gabor filter bank; He, Zhang, Pereira, Gómez, and Wangstudies use visible or near infrared reflectance spectroscopy for detecting tomato quality by measuring the quality characteristics of tomato ‘heat-wave’; Liou and Huang develop a neural location predictor to predict the location of a mobile host in communications. Advanced control theory. Finally, this special issue includes three theoretic papers to reflect some latest advances in control theory. Zhang, Chu and Wang propose a new theoretical framework for self-tuning control by employing a virtual equivalent system method; Wang, Wang and Liu study the -stability criteria for discrete-time singular systems with multiple time delays; and finally the robust fault-tolerant controller for a type of linear uncertain systems with multiple time delays is studied by Li and Dai. In addition to presenting new ideas and technological advances in their respective areas, the authors of the papers have also raised some interesting questions and prompted useful discussions. Some of the views expressed in these papers may be even controversial, but this is however normal and expected. Therefore, we hope that the papers included in this special issue will also serve as a catalyst for further debate on the general direction and research trend in the development of intelligent computing in automatic control and information fusion. T. X. Mei, Guest Editor The University of Leeds Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK K. Li, Guest Editor Queen’s University of Belfast Belfast, BT9 5AH, UK Q. Zhao, Guest Editor University of Alberta Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, T6G2V4 G. Maione Polytechnic of Bari Viale del Turismo, 8, 74100 Taranto, Italy T. X. Mei |