Guest Editorial Ernesto Damiani UniversitY, di Milano, Dipartimento di Tecnologie dell'Informasione ednmiani@crema.unimi.it It is a cherished tradition of the Applied Computing Review to publish each year a Special Issue including extended and updated versions of the best papers that appp~red in the Proceedings of the Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC). Having been involved with SAC since 1995, first as a Session Chair, then as the Neuro-Fuzzy Track Chair and more recently as the Local Arrangements Chair for the 2000 edition, I especially welcomed the new challenge of being the Guest Editor of the ACR Special Issue for SAC 2001. I was well aware the selection process was to be difficult: SAC 2001 papers show a high average quality, thanks to the steady incrp~me in the number of submissions, the careful monitoring of the Program Committee and the dedication of all Track Chairs. The selection procedure for this special issue was organized as follows: all SAC Track Chairs were requested to vote electronically for the best paper in their Track, taking into account both its technical quality and its appeal to non-specialists. A quick round of reviews was then organized to put together a short list of four papers representing the very best contributions to SAC 2001. Some exclusions were indeed pai,~ul, but I like to think that the final result is somewhat a rarity in the technical literature: a set of papers that contaln significantcontributions to the research in their field, while remaining accessible and interesting to non-specialists. Namely, the paper by Liu et al. shows h o w advanced data storage and mmxageinent techniques supporting visualisation can be applied to an important medical problem: the non-invasive treatment of brain aneurysms. This paper perfectly demonstrates SAC's increasing attention to applications of information technology in the medical and biological fields. The paper by Munteanu and Rosa successfully attacks the automatic vs. manual image p.nhaucement conundrum by applying Genetic Algorithms to reproduce the behavior of a human user. Okada ~ ai. present a virtual environment suitable for a new style of collaborative environmental education. I expect this paper to be of particular interest to those among us who are trying to enlarge the field of application of e-learning te~h-iques. Fin.ally, Yajima et al. present an innovative technique for managing scheduling and caching in push-based information systems. T a g into account the degree of correlation among data to be broadcasted, this paper shows how data semantics is becoming an important issue even when designing data transmission protocols and applications. Let me finiah with a round of aclmowledgements. First of all, I wish to thank all Track Chairs who participated in selection' process. Thanks are also due to Giancarlo Succi, ACR Editor-in-Chief, for his helpfulness, and to the SAC Program Chairs George Papadopoulos and Hisbam Haddad for giving us a great SAC 2001 Program (thereby making my work harder..) I .... .5-. '

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