International Journal of Information Technology Vol.�20 No.�1 2014 Editoral Computing devices have become increasingly ubiquitous in recent years. They permeate almost every aspect of our daily life, serving us in many situations while being our masters in some other contexts. Since we developed computing devices and techniques to play certain roles in our community, it has been found that nature can sometimes help us design useful computing technologies. People have spent a great deal of effort trying to understand how a colony of ants coordinate their effort to search for food and expand their reaches, or how hundreds of thousands of individual birds flying in a swarm manage to avoid bumping into each other and display collective behaviors that improve their chances of survival. The insights derived from such natural science studies have formed a useful basis for novel computing techniques to emerge. These computing techniques can be referred to as nature inspired computing. The goal of this special issue is to foster research in both insightful theoretical analysis and real world practices in nature inspired computing. The aim is to bring together scholars to identify the key techniques characterizing nature inspired computing and contemplate how they can be applied to solve real-world problems. In this special issue, we have selected papers on both the theoretical and the practical aspects of nature inspired computing. We feature prominently the technique of ant colony optimization and particle swarm optimization where collective behavior of insects and animals are being mimicked by computers to solve challenging problems. We also include papers on the application of other nature inspired techniques such as pattern recognitions and trust in human communities in the domain of computer security. We hope it will serve as a good starting point for more in-depth discussions among the researchers as well as the industry
Chunyan Miao
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