Special issue: Various forms of intelligence

Technologies such as cloud, MapReduce and highspeed mobile connectivity have enabled data-driven decision making to deliver new insights. For example, ‘big data’ are providing insights into effective medical treatments, health care cost management, and marketing products. As data become constantly available and ubiquitous, in our opinion the next wave of innovations ought to be related to finding solutions to the problem – known and yet-to-be-discovered ones – created by these technologies and their dependent services. The future of computing related to decision making should be about helping all stakeholders make sense out of complex situations and data, and to utilize the capabilities on offer. In short, we need intelligent systems. All data have to be legible and the resulting information intelligible. One needs something more than the ordinary, something going beyondmere technology and availability – something that is smart, often simple, hopefully genuine and always a bit ahead of the customary. One of the main characteristics of intelligence is the ability to manage context. The essence of intelligent behaviour is the awareness of context, the ability to realize changes in context and the readiness to accommodate that. That is the reason why the 2012 International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) 8.3 conference (DSS 2012) focused on the topic “Fusing DSS into the Fabric of the Context”. The bi-annual conferences of the IFIP 8.3 DSS (decision support systems) working group are focused on decision support and its system, and this area has grown in reach over the close to three decades since the first conference was initiated and has had a huge influence on the traditional understanding of DSS. Consider, for example, the spread of social networking and the meaning of its “crowd” power: is virtual crowd behaviour going to help individuals make wiser decisions or will it lead us as a society to decision making determined by the lowest common denominator? Or look at the challenges of Big Data: is it going to end in smarter data or will just result in an ever-increasing demand for larger storage spaces? Is business intelligence – often fuelled by cloud solutions – going to help organizational decision makers or is it going to lead us to poor decisions on risk-taking? BI, dashboards, Big Data, 2.0 and other ideas have penetrated the realm of Decision Support, essentially challenging the definition of DSS. Indeed, DSS is getting new momentum from these solutions and technologies as was demonstrated by the range of papers presented at DSS 2012. This change in the ICT and the DSS landscape is the reason that this Special Issue of the Intelligent Decision Technologies journal is devoted to various forms of intelligence. The need for more intelligent solutions has inspired this collection. The ideas presented in the papers selected for this special issue address the question of intelligence in decision making in several ways: each is taking its on approach; each adds something extra to go beyond the ordinary; each seeks something more than expected in their usual context; each displays a spark of genuine intelligence. So, to reappropriate the title of the conference, this special issue attempts to demonstrate how to fuse context into DSS solutions in order to take a step (or two) towards more