Expert Systems With Applications is a refereed international journal whose focus is on exchanging information relating to expert and intelligent systems applied in industry, government, and universities worldwide. The thrust of the journal is to publish papers dealing with the design, development, testing, implementation, and/or management of expert and intelligent systems, and also to provide practical guidelines in the development and management of these systems. The journal will publish papers in expert and intelligent systems technology and application in the areas of, but not limited to: finance, accounting, engineering, marketing, auditing, law, procurement and contracting, project management, risk assessment, information management, information retrieval, crisis management, stock trading, strategic management, network management, telecommunications, space education, intelligent front ends, intelligent database management systems, medicine, chemistry, human resources management, human capital, business, production management, archaeology, economics, energy, and defense. Papers in multi-agent systems, knowledge management, neural networks, knowledge discovery, data and text mining, multimedia mining, and genetic algorithms will also be published in the journal.