Editorial:

GSIS SELECTED LECTURES

With great pleasure the editorial office of Interdisciplinary Information Sciences would like to announce the launch of the new section GSIS Selected Lectures. Graduate School of Information Sciences (GSIS), since its establishment in 1993, has delivered many high quality lectures on information sciences, promoting interdisciplinary research that ranges from the fundamentals to new frontiers. The new section is devoted to the publication of such lectures in order to enhance the communication among the world-wide academic societies.

The new section GSIS Selected Lectures is launched by an excellent survey article by Professor Fumio Hiai on matrix analysis. The aim of this article is to present a substantial part of the theory of matrix inequalities from fundamentals to applications. It covers operator monotone function, operator convex functions, operator means, spectral variation and majorization, norm inequalities, and related topics. Moreover, it contains historical remarks on the pioneering paper by F. Kraus (1936) and some original results on characterization of operator convex functions. This survey article can be used as a basic reference for researchers as well as graduate students who are working on advanced linear algebra, functional analysis, and operator theory.

The GSIS Selected Lectures, covering a wide range of topics, will appear occasionally in the regular publication. We are more than happy if our publications help the readers with various research backgrounds to realize what kind of issues are under discussion in their own field and related ones.

Nobuaki Obata    
Editor-in-Chief    
September 1, 2010