A survey has been designed to seek the practical foundation of base process activities (BPAs) in the software industry and to support research in modelling the software engineering processes. A superset of BPAs compatible with the current software process models, such as SPICE (ISO 15504), CMM, ISO 9000 and BOOTSTRAP, were identified for the construction of the questionnaires. This paper reports the survey findings on BPAs in software engineering processes. A summary of the current software engineering process techniques and practices modelled by 83 BPAs in 10 processes and three categories is given. Each BPA is benchmarked on attributes of mean importance and ratios of significance, practice and effectiveness. Based on the benchmarks, and by comparing with the current practice of the reader's organization, recommendations can be given on which specific areas need to have processes established first, and which areas should be highest priority for process improvement.

The paper presents an evolutionary fuzzy network method for prediction in foreign exchange markets. The research chooses the financial data used in the Santa Fe time series forecasting competition, 1990-91 (Weigend, 1994). The choice of this data provides a comparative study of the previous attempts to forecast. Fuzzy systems not only provide the mechanism to integrate human linguistic knowledge into logical framework but also provides the means to extract fuzzy rules from an observed data set. For global optimisation, genetic algorithms are used to adapt the parameters of the fuzzy network in order to obtain the best performance.

This paper describes the high-level design and specification of an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) to implement a pattern matching algorithm based on vector quantization (VQ) and speaker verification algorithms. The ASIC uses a fully synchronous top-down design methodology with a hardware description language, ELLA. As well as presenting details of the algorithm and register-transfer level structure, the paper presents the hierarchical design methodology used to implement the algorithm in a low cost ASIC. The approach can be applied to a wide range of digital signal processing functions. The goal of is to develop a pattern matching system based on the VQ and codebooks which can be used as a alternative to the current software systems.