A knowledge-based system integrated with software is the essential enabler for science and the new economy. It creates new markets and new directions for a more reliable, flexible and robust society. It empowers the exploration of our world in ever more depth. However, software often falls short of our expectations. Current software methodologies, tools, and techniques do not remain robust and neither are they sufficiently reliable for a constantly changing and evolving market. Many promising approaches have proved to be no more than case-by-case oriented methods that are not fully automated.

This book explores new trends and theories which illuminate the direction of developments in this field, developments which we believe will lead to a transformation of the role of software and science integration in tomorrow's global information society.

By discussing issues ranging from research practices and techniques and methodologies to proposing and reporting solutions needed for global world business, it offers an opportunity for the software science community to think about where we are today and where we are going.

The book aims to capture the essence of a new state of the art in software science and its supporting technology, and to identify the challenges that such a technology will have to master. It contains extensively reviewed papers presented at the 17th round of the International Conference on New Trends in Intelligent Software Methodology Tools, and Techniques (SoMeT_18) held in Granada, with the collaboration of the University of Granada, from September 26–28, 2018. (http://secaba.ugr.es/SOMET2018/).

This round of SoMeT_18 is celebrating its 17th anniversary. The SoMeT

Previous related events that contributed to this publication are: SoMeT_02 (the Sorbonne, Paris, 2002); SoMeT_03 (Stockholm, Sweden, 2003); SoMeT_04 (Leipzig, Germany, 2004); SoMeT_05 (Tokyo, Japan, 2005); SoMeT_06 (Quebec, Canada, 2006); SoMeT_07 (Rome, Italy, 2007); SoMeT_08 (Sharjah, UAE, 2008); SoMeT_09 (Prague, Czech Republic, 2009); SoMeT_10 (Yokohama, Japan, 2010), and SoMeT_11 (Saint Petersburg, Russia), SoMeT_12 (Genoa, Italy), SoMeT_13 (Budapest, Hungary), SoMeT_14 (Langkawi, Malaysia), SoMeT_15 (Naples, Italy), SoMeT_16 (Larnaca, Cyprus), SoMeT_17 (Kitakyushu, Japan).

This conference brought together researchers and practitioners in order to share their original research results and practical development experience in software science and related new technologies.

This volume and the conference in the SoMeT series provides an opportunity for exchanging ideas and experiences in the field of software technology; opening up new avenues for software development, methodologies, tools, and techniques, especially with regard to intelligent software by applying artificial intelligence techniques in software development, and by tackling human interaction in the development process for a better high-level interface. The emphasis has been placed on human-centric software methodologies, end-user development techniques, and emotional reasoning, for an optimally harmonized performance between the design tool and the user.

Intelligence in software systems resembles the need to apply machine learning methods and data mining techniques to software design for high level systems applications in decision support system, data streaming, health care prediction, and other data driven systems.

A major goal of this work was to assemble the work of scholars from the international research community to discuss and share research experiences of new software methodologies and techniques. One of the important issues addressed is the handling of cognitive issues in software development to adapt it to the user's mental state. Tools and techniques related to this aspect form part of the contribution to this book. Another subject raised at the conference was intelligent software design in software ontology and conceptual software design in practice human centric information system application.

The book also investigates other comparable theories and practices in software science, including emerging technologies, from their computational foundations in terms of models, methodologies, and tools. This is essential for a comprehensive overview of information systems and research projects, and to assess their practical impact on real-world software problems. This represents another milestone in mastering the new challenges of software and its promising technology, addressed by the SoMeT conferences, and provides the reader with new insights, inspiration and concrete material to further the study of this new technology.

The book is a collection of carefully selected refereed papers by the reviewing committee and covering (but not limited to):

• Software engineering aspects of software security programmes, diagnosis and maintenance

• Static and dynamic analysis of software performance models

• Software security aspects and networking

• Agile software and lean methods

• Practical artefacts of software security, software validation and diagnosis

• Software optimization and formal methods

• Intelligent Decision Support Systems

• Software methodologies and related techniques

• Automatic software generation, re-coding and legacy systems

• Software quality and process assessment

• Intelligent software systems design and evolution

• Artificial Intelligence Techniques on Software Engineering, and Requirement Engineering

• End-user requirement engineering, programming environment for Web applications

• Ontology, cognitive models and philosophical aspects on software design,

• Business oriented software application models,

• Emergency Management Informatics, software methods and application for supporting Civil Protection, First Response and Disaster Recovery

• Model Driven Development (DVD), code centric to model centric software engineering

• Cognitive Software and human behavioural analysis in software design.

We have received high-quality submissions and among it we have selected the 80 best-quality revised articles published in this book. Referees in the program committee have carefully reviewed all these submissions, and on the basis of technical soundness, relevance, originality, significance, and clarity, the 80 papers were selected. They were then revised on the basis of the review reports before being accepted by the SoMeT_18 international reviewing committee. It is worth stating that there were three to four reviewers for each paper published in this book. The book is divided into 13 Chapters, as follows:

CHAPTER 1 – Intelligent Software Systems Design, and Application

CHAPTER 2 – Medical Informatics and Bioinformatics, Software Methods and Application for Biomedicine and Bioinformatics

CHAPTER 3 – Software Systems Security and techniques

CHAPTER 4 – Intelligent Decision Support Systems:

CHAPTER 5 – Recommender System and Intelligent Software Systems

CHAPTER 6 – Artificial Intelligence Techniques on Software Engineering

CHAPTER 7 – Ontologies based Knowledge-Based Systems

CHAPTER 8 – Software Tools Methods and Agile Software

CHAPTER 9 – Formal Techniques for System Software and Quality assessment

CHAPTER 10 – Social learning software and sentiment analysis

CHAPTER 11 – Empirical studies on knowledge modelling and textual analysis.

CHAPTER 12 – Knowledge Science and Intelligent Computing

CHAPTER 13 – Cognitive Systems and Neural Analytics

This book is the result of a collective effort from many industrial partners and colleagues throughout the world. We would especially like to acknowledge our gratitude for the support provided by the University of Granada, and all the authors who contributed their invaluable support to this work. We also thank the SoMeT 2018 Keynote speakers: Professor Vincenzo Loia, University of Salerno, Italy, Prof. Dr. Imre Rudas, Professor Emeritus of Óbuda University, Hungary, and Dr. Juan Bernabé-Moreno, Head of Global Advanced Analytics Unit: EON, Germany.

Most especially, we thank the reviewing committee and all those who participated in the rigorous reviewing process and the lively discussion and evaluation meetings which led to the selected papers published in this book. Last and not least, we would also like to thank the Microsoft Conference Management Tool team for their expert guidance on the use of the Microsoft CMT System as a conference-support tool during all the phases of SoMeT_18.

Hamido Fujita

Enrique Herrera-Viedma