Special issue on the Design of Intelligent Environment

When we analyse behaviour from the viewpoint of information technologies, computer-supportedsystems may be mainly divided into two types of functional mechanisms. There are processing means and communication means. These two systems sort our activities from the view of Function and Mechanism. This special issue focuses on the correspondence between persons and computers or information systems and from the viewpoint of service support. It also investigates the use of information technologies in a wide range of application fields. This is done in terms of the current state-of-art. This volume contains eight research papers dealing with the theory and applications in a computersupported behaviour environment. These eight papers may be divided into four groups. These are the Computer Support for personal activities in the first two papers and Computer Support for an E-learning Environment in the next two papers. Computer Support for Information Networks is dealt with in a successive paper. Finally Computer Support for Social Simulation is covered in the remaining three papers. The first paper by Watanabe and others focuses on extracting the information exchanged in collaborative learning process. It provides knowledge for the solution of the subjects discussed. It organizes the knowledge structure into a usable form. This usable