Maximum Entropy in Actio

This volume has its origin in the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Workshops on and Bayesian Methods in Applied Statistics", held at "Maximum-Entropy the University of Wyoming, August 5-8, 1985, and at Seattle University, August 5-8, 1986, and August 4-7, 1987.

This volume has its origin in the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Workshops on "Maximum-Entropy and Bayesian Methods in Applied Statistics", held at the University of Wyoming, August 5-8, 1985, and at Seattle University, August 5-8, 1986, and August 4-7, 1987. It was anticipated that the proceedings of these workshops would be combined, so most of the papers were not collected until after the seventh workshop.

This volume contains the text of the twenty-five papers presented at two workshops entitled Maximum-Entropy and Bayesian Methods in Applied Statistics, which were held at the University of Wyoming from June 8 to 10, 1981, and from August 9 to 11, 1982. The workshops were organized to bring together researchers from different fields to critically examine maxi­ mum-entropy and Bayesian methods in science, engineering, medicine, oceanography, economics, and other disciplines.

In order to measure and quantify the complex behavior of real-world systems, either novel mathematical approaches or modifications of classical ones are required to precisely predict, monitor, and control complicated chaotic and stochastic processes. Though the term of entropy comes from Greek and emphasizes its analogy to energy, today, it has wandered to different branches of pure and applied sciences and is understood in a rather rough way, with emphasis placed on the transition from regular to chaotic states, stochastic and deterministic disorder, and uniform and non-uniform distribution or decay of diversity. This collection of papers addresses the notion of entropy in a very broad sense.

Image analysis is a fundamental task for any application where extracting information from images is required. The analysis requires highly sophisticated numerical and analytical methods, particularly for those applications in medicine, security, and other fields where the results of the processing consist of data of vital importance. This fact is evident from all the articles composing the Special Issue "Entropy in Image Analysis II", in which the authors used widely tested methods to verify their results. In the process of reading the present volume, the reader will appreciate the richness of their methods and applications, in particular for medical imaging and image security, and a remarkable cross-fertilization among the proposed research areas.

The last two decades have witnessed an enormous growth with regard to ap­ plications of information theoretic framework in areas of physical, biological, engineering and even social sciences. In particular, growth has been spectac­ ular in the field of information technology,soft computing,nonlinear systems and molecular biology. Claude Shannon in 1948 laid the foundation of the field of information theory in the context of communication theory. It is in­ deed remarkable that his framework is as relevant today as was when he 1 proposed it. Shannon died on Feb 24, 2001. Arun Netravali observes "As if assuming that inexpensive, high-speed processing would come to pass, Shan­ non figured out the upper limits on communication rates.

This workshop series was initiated by Myron Tribus and Edwin T. Jaynes, and organised for the first time by C.Ray Smith and Walter T. Grandy in 1981 at the University in Wyoming. Since then, tremendous progress has been made and the number of publications based on Bayesian methods is impressive

Modern astronomical research faces a vast range of statistical issues which have spawned a revival in methodological activity among astronomers. The Statistical Challenges in Modern Astronomy II conference, held in June 1996 at the Pennsylvania State University five years after the first conference, brought astronomers and statisticians together to discuss methodological issues of common interest. Time series analysis, image analysis, Bayesian methods, Poisson processes, nonlinear regression, maximum likelihood, multivariate classification, and wavelet and multiscale analyses were important themes.

This EMS volume consists of two parts, written by leading scientists in the field of operator algebras and non-commutative geometry. The first part, written by M.Rordam entitled "Classification of Nuclear, Simple C*-Algebras" is on Elliotts classification program. The emphasis is on the classification by Kirchberg and Phillips of Kirchberg algebras: purely infinite, simple, nuclear separable C*-algebras. This classification result is described almost with full proofs starting from Kirchbergs tensor product theorems and Kirchbergs embedding theorem for exact C*-algebras.