Computer and Information Sciences/ISCIS 2003

The International Symposium on Computer and Information Sciences (ISCIS) brought together researchers and practitioners from all over the world to - change ideas and experiences on their recent research in all areas of the c- puter and information sciences. This year, the 18th ISCIS was organized by the Department of Computer Engineering at the Middle East Technical University, and was held in Antalya, Turkey. This year was the ?rst in which the proceedings of ISCIS were published in the LNCS series by Springer-Verlag. The proceedings include 135 papers that were selected by the program committee from over 360 contributions submitted from 25 di?erent countries. Thesymposiumthisyearcoveredthefollowingtopicsinthecomputerand- formationsciences:architecturesandsystems,computersciencetheory,databases and information retrieval, e-business, graphics and computer vision, intelligent systemsandrobotics,multimedia,networksandsecurity,parallelanddistributed computing, soft computing, and software engineering. The support from the following institutions is deeply appreciated: - METU (Middle East Technical University) ¿ ? - TUBITAK (Scienti?c and Technical Research Council of Turkey) - IEEE, Turkey Section - IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing) I must also express my sincere thanks to all the people who contributed their time and great e?ort to make the symposium possible. My very special thanks ? go to the organizing committee, namely Semra Do? ganda? g, Sertan Girgin, Ismail ¿ Ozturk, ¿ Ahmet Sä can and Cevat S ¿ener, who did very active and endless work and put tremendous e?ort into the symposium. I also thank many other c- leagues for their special contributions to the symposium.