361 About the Contributors Yanchang Zhao is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Data Sciences & Knowledge Discovery Re- search Lab, Centre for Quantum Computation and Intelligent Systems, Faculty of Engineering & IT, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. His research interests focus on association rules, sequential patterns, clustering and post-mining. He has published more than 30 papers on the above topics, includ- ing six journal articles and two book chapters. He served as a chair of two international workshops, and a program committee member for 11 international conferences and a reviewer for 8 international journals and over a dozen of international conferences. Chengqi Zhang is a Research Professor in Faculty of Engineering & IT, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. He is the director of the Director of UTS Research Centre for Quantum Computa- tion and Intelligent Systems and a Chief Investigator in Data Mining Program for Australian Capital Markets on Cooperative Research Centre. He has been a chief investigator of eight research projects. His research interests include Data Mining and Multi-Agent Systems. He is a co-author of three monographs, a co-editor of nine books, and an author or co-author of more than 150 research papers. He is the chair of the ACS (Australian Computer Society) National Committee for Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems, a chair/member of the Steering Committee for three international conference. Longbing Cao is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Engineering and IT, University of Tech- nology, Sydney (UTS), Australia. He is the Director of the Data Sciences & Knowledge Discovery Research Lab at the Centre for Quantum Computation and Intelligent Systems at UTS. He also holds the position of Research Leader of the Data Mining Program at the Australian Capital Markets Cooperative Research Centre. His research interests focus on data mining, multi-agent systems, and the integration of agents and data mining. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE Computer Society and SMC Society. He has over 100 publications, including monographs and edited books. He has led the investigation of around 20 research and industry projects in data mining and intelligent systems. He has served as an organiser and program committee member on over 30 international conferences and workshops in data mining and multi-agent systems. * * * Maria-Luiza Antonie received her MSc degree in Computing Science from University of Alberta. Her main research interests focus on building and improving Associative Classifiers. She is interested in data mining and machine learning and their application in healthcare. She has published more than 10 Copyright © 2009, IGI Global, distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. About the Contributors articles in international venues and has reviewed scientific articles for multiple prestigious conferences. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta. Julien Blanchard earned his PhD in 2005 from Nantes University (France) and is currently an as- sistant professor at Polytechnic School of Nantes University. He is the author of 3 book chapters and 8 journal and international conference papers in the areas of visualization and interestingness measures for data mining. Mirko Boettcher st ud ie d comput e r scie nce a nd psycholog y at t he Un ive r sit y of Magdeburg, Germany. After graduating in 2005 with distinction with a MSc in computer science he joined the Intelligent Sys- tems Research Centre of BT Group plc, United Kingdom, as a Research Scientist where he conducted research into industrial applications of temporal and change mining. Currently he is undertaking a PhD with the University of Magdeburg. In parallel, he is working as a software architect specialized in data mining systems. His research interests +include association rules, decision trees, approaches of change mining, and dynamic aspects of data mining in general. Veronica Oliveira de Carvalho received her BS degree in Computer Science from UNIP (Brazil), in 2000, the MS degree in Computer Science from UFSCar (Brazil), in 2003, and the PhD degree in Computer Science from USP (Brazil), in 2007. Currently she is a professor at Faculty of Informatics, University of Oeste Paulista at Presidente Prudente, Brazil. Her research interests include machine learning and data mining. Hacène Cherfiis presently a PhD – Research Engineer in Semantic Wed and Text Mining at INRIA - Sophia Antipolis, France. His research interests are Knowledge Engineering for texts using Natural Language Processing, and Knowledge representation with semantic Web technologies. He is involved in European research project on Semantic Virtual Engineering Environment for Product Design. Hacène CHERFI got his PhD degree in 2004 from the Henri Poincare University in Nancy, France. His PhD dissertation is about Text Mining techniques using association rules to represent textual corpora. He got in 2005 a Post-doctoral position at UQO: University of Quebec in Ottawa (Canada) dealing with automatic illustration of a text with images using their labels. Hacène CHERFI has an active publication record among which a journal (Soft Computing) and major international conferences (ECAI, ICCS on conceptual structures, Web intelligence). Silvia Chiusano received the master’s and PhD degrees in computer engineering from the Politec- nico di Torino. She has been an assistant professor in the Dipartimento di Automatica e Informatica, Politecnico di Torino, since January 2004. Her current research interests are in the areas of data mining and database systems, in particular, integration of data mining techniques into relational DBMSs and classification of structured and sequential data. David Chodos received an MMath in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo in 2007, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Computing Science at the University of Alberta. His research in- terests include data mining, web-based software, and virtual environments, with a focus on the use of virtual environments in educational settings. His research is funded by an NSERC scholarship, and involves collaboration with people from various fields including healthcare, educational psychology and business. 362 About the Contributors Olivier Couturier received the PhD degree in computer science from University of Artois, Lens, France, in 2005. He focuses on data mining user driven approach and post mining (visualization of large amount of data). He was ATER between 2005 and 2007. He has been technical reviewer of different national and international workshops. He is currently engineer in Jouve group. Guozhu Dong is a professor at Wright State University. He received his PhD from the University of Southern California in 1988. His main research interests are databases, data mining, and bioinformatics. He has published over 110 research papers, published a book entitled “Sequence Data Mining,” holds 3 US patents, and won the Best Paper Award from IEEE ICDM 2005. He was a program committee co-chair of the 2003 International Conference on Web-Age Information Management (WAIM) and the 2007 Joint International APWeb/WAIM Conferences. He serves on the steering committee of the WAIM conference series and the editorial board of International Journal of Information Technology. He served on over 60 conference program committees. His research has been funded by government agencies (NSF, ARC, AFRL) and private corporations. He is a senior member of IEEE and a member of ACM. Mengling Feng is a research assistant at School of Computing, National University of Singapore. He is currently pursuing his PhD degree from Nanyang Technological University. He received his Bachelor degree in 2003 from Nanyang Technological University. His main research interests are in data mining, especially pattern mining and pattern maintenance. Qinrong Feng was born in Shanxi, China, in 1972. She received her BS in Computational Mathemat- ics in 1994 from Shanxi University, MS in Computer Algebra in 2000 from Shanxi Normal University. She is now a PhD candidate of Computer Sciences at Tongji University of China. Her research interests include Data Mining, Rough Sets, and Granular Computing. Magaly Lika Fujimoto Fujimoto received her BS degree in Informatics from USP (Brazil), in 2006, and the MS degree in Computer Science from USP (Brazil), in 2008. Currently she works as analyst of development in a company called ITG at São Paulo, Brazil. Her research interests include machine learning and data mining. Paolo Garza received the master’s and PhD degrees in computer engineering from the Politecnico di Torino. He has been a postdoctoral fellow in the Dipartimento di Automatica e Informatica, Politecnico di Torino, since January 2005. His current research interests include data mining and database systems. In particular, he has worked on the classification of structured and unstructured data, clustering, and itemset mining algorithms. Fabrice Guillet is currently a member of the LINA laboratory (CNRS 2729) at Polytechnic School of Nantes University (France). He holds a PhD in Computer Science in 1995 from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications de Bretagne. He is author of 35 international publications in data mining and knowledge management. He is a foundator and a permanent member of the Steering Com- mittee of the annual EGC French-speaking conference. Tarek Hamrouni is a PhD student at the Faculty of Sciences