Welcome message from the general chair

The 2012 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence for Security and Defense Applications (CISDA) presents a wide range of applications to very challenging problems in the security and defense domains. IEEE CISDA 2012 is the fifth forum (the first was held in 2007) on CI for security and defense applications. The organizers concentrate on Creating Intelligent Surveillance (CIS) by selectively applying CI techniques to surveillance applications. This is demonstrated by papers on anomaly detection for explosive hazards as well as radioactive material concealment that utilized support vector machines (SVMs) and autoassociators. Other papers discuss topics such as the creation and simulation of courses of action using cloud-based planning, the detection of buried objects again using features such as histogram of gradients (HOG) and an SVM classifier and the analysis of simulation and real-world complex systems data with heterogeneous structures to improve the surveillance of communication networks. IEEE CISDA 2012 also offers four special sessions; the first provides an interdisciplinary forum for researchers and practitioners to share their experiences in the field of CI in biometrics; the second focuses on automated collection, processing, analysis, and dissemination of relevant information to make intelligent coordinated adaptations to plans that optimize performance in dynamic and complex domains; the third focuses on the latest security threats, vulnerabilities, and attacks on emerging wireless technologies, and novel computationally-intelligent techniques to mitigate them; the fourth presents novel methods for the extraction of intelligence from existing forms of social media, and the support for rapidly evolving and new forms of social media.