Cooperative Design, Visualization, and Engineering

Many papers in this volume re?ect, to some degree, the active, rapid economic developmentincertaingeographicareasintheworldsuchasChina,Japan,South Korea,and EasternEurope, which demand cooperative work,particularly co- erative engineering, more than ever. New concepts and new ideas of cooperative design, visualization, and engineering have emerged to meet the higher demand resulting from the economic development in these areas. Another trend among the papers in this volume is to apply existing concepts and methods to new application areas. The emergence of new concepts can be considered as a signal of fruitful research with its maturity in the ?eld. This can be found in the papers of this year's conference. Cooperative design, visualization, and engineering via cloud computing is a new concept presented in a group of papers in this volume. The concept of cloud has been proposed for cooperative manufacturing, large scale cooperative simulation, and visualization, etc. Applying existing concepts to new application areas or creating new me- ods based on them is a logicaldirection to takefull advantageof the cooperative design, visualization, and engineering technology. This is no doubt the best way to widen anddeepen the knowledgein the ?eld. Typicalexamples in this volume include the cooperative visualization of DNA microarray data in bioinform- ics, astrophysical simulations, natural disaster simulations, and cooperative risk assessment, etc. As the volume editor, I would like to congratulate all the authors for their research and development results, raising cooperative technology to a new level.