|
International Journal of Information Technology Vol. 11 No. 12 2005 (Special Issue) Guest Editorial Special Issue on Security Engineering & Financial Series Analysis Welcome to the special issue of IJIT on Security Engineering & Financial Series Analysis! The immense growth in technology has contributed to the inter-dependency of the industry, stock market and every other system that man has built. This dependency inherently introduces more complexity and numerous variables that drive the growth or the failure of any system. Whether it is a large software system or a power-plant management system, resources at hand will not dictate the success of a project as evident by the recent collapse of the FBI Virtual Case File database system. The silver lining in this enormous cloud is that there are many research groups in the world today trying to untangle this complexity at least to a manageable level in order to deliver some predictability. The recent successful completion of ICIC2005 conference has brought diverse views from all over the world in tackling these issues. We have managed to group this research in this special edition to two identifiable tracks; Security Engineering and Financial Series Analysis. Security engineering is about building systems to remain dependable in the face of malice, error or mischance. As a discipline, it focuses on the tools, processes and methods needed to design, implement and test complete systems, and to adapt existing systems as their environment evolves. It also includes branch of cryptography and well-known watermarking of digital items. On the other hand, Financial Series Analysis involves trends in markets, stock prices and many things that people like to predict based on past performances. This issue starts off with number of contributions in Fault Diagnosis systems both in hardware systems and software. Liu et. al. present their research on a system that generates Chinese sentences depending on the severity of the fault and Ruan et. al. analyze applications of FPGA in Field of Relay Protection. There are other interesting articles by Xu et. al. introducing a model for multi-stage manufacturing processes whereas Tang et. al. describe an audio watermarking system. The second track of this special issue contains number of contributions to Financial Series Analysis. Research on Host Load Prediction is given an in-depth treatment by Yang et. al. followed by a very interesting article on Catastrophe Prediction providing insight into explosive growth of locusts that destroy crops using data collected over many decades. We certainly believe that these expert papers on their respective fields will certainly extend the horizons of research everywhere in the world and would like to thank all our contributing authors for their dedicated work. Prashan Premaratne, Guest Editor University of Wollongong School of Electrical, Computer and Telecommunications Engineering North Wollongong, NSW 2522 Australia. prashan@uow.edu.au Prashan Premaratne |