Author Description

The IDEAL conference boast a vibrant and successful history dating back to 1998, th and this edition marked the 10 anniversary, an important milestone demonstrating the increasing popularity and high quality of the IDEAL conferences. Burgos, the capital of medieval Spain and a lively city today, was a perfect venue to celebrate such an occasion. The conference has become a unique, established and broad int- disciplinary forum for researchers and practitioners in many fields to interact with each other and with leading academics and industries in the areas of machine lea- ing, information processing, data mining, knowledge management, bio-informatics, neuro-informatics, bio-inspired models, agents and distributed systems, and hybrid systems. IDEAL 2009 received over 200 submissions. After a rigorous peer-review process, the International Programme Committee accepted 100 high-quality papers to be - cluded in the conference proceedings. In this 10th edition, a special emphasis was given on the organization of workshops and special sessions. Two workshops were organized under the framework of IDEAL 2009: MIR Day 2009 and Nature-Inspired Models for Industrial Applications. Five special sessions were organized by leading researchers in their fields on various topics such as Soft Computing Techniques in Data Mining, - cent Advances on Swarm-Based Computing, Intelligent Computational Techniques in Medical Image Processing, Advances on Ensemble Learning and Information Fusion, and Financial and Business Engineering (Modelling and Applications).