Since year 2000, scientists on artificial and natural intelligences started to study chance discovery - methods for discovering events/situations that significantly affect decision making. Partially because the editors Ohsawa and Abe are teaching at schools of Engineering and of Literature with sharing the interest in chance discovery, this book reflects interdisciplinary aspects of progress:

First, as an interdisciplinary melting pot of cognitive science, computational intelligence, data mining/visualization, collective intelligence, … etc, chance discovery came to reach new application domains e.g. health care, aircraft control, energy plant, management of technologies, product designs, innovations, marketing, finance etc.

Second, basic technologies and sciences including sensor technologies, medical sciences, communication technologies etc. joined this field and interacted with cognitive/computational scientists in workshops on chance discovery, to obtain breakthroughs by stimulating each other. Third, “time” came to be introduced explicitly as a significant variable ruling causalities - background situations causing chances and chances causing impacts on events and actions of humans in the future. Readers may urge us to list the fourth, fifth, sixth, … but let us stop here and open this book.