Despite being subjected to an economic downturn that is yet to recover, computers and information technology (IT) continue to drive and influence innovation, growth and development in almost all sectors of the world economy. The gains in efficiency and productivity obtained from the optimum use of emerging computer and IT technologies are having lasting impacts on the global society. These technologies are also playing a vital role in human health care and in enhancing our knowledge and understanding of the environment by supporting advanced modelling underpinned by high performance algorithms and processing paradigms. At the core of the continuing uptake and impact of computer and IT technologies is the research that is conducted worldwide in these fields. During the past decade the IEEE International Conference on Computer and Information Technology (ICCIT) has been successful in bringing together academics, researchers, IT professionals and managers to disseminate and discuss the up to date research findings in these fields.
   This Special Issue presents selected papers from the twelfth conference of the series (ICCIT 2009) held during December 21-23, 2009 at the Independent University Bangladesh. The first one was held in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 1998. Since then the conference has grown to one of the largest computer and IT related research conferences in the South Asian region, with participation of academics and researchers from many countries around the world. Authors are required to submit full length papers to the conference for review. A double blind review process is followed whereby each paper is reviewed by at least two independent reviewers of high international standing. The acceptance rate of papers in recent years has been around 32% or less. This is an indication of the quality of work the papers accepted for the conference demonstrates. Starting in 2008 the proceedings of ICCIT are included in IEEExplore. The 2009 ICCIT papers are no exception.
    In 2009, a total of 473 full papers were submitted to the conference of which 150 were accepted after reviews conducted by an international program committee comprising 84 members from 16 countries with assistance from 96 reviewers. This was tantamount to an acceptance rate of 31.7%. Form the 150 papers accepted for the conference only 14 highly ranked papers were invited for this Special Issue. The authors were invited to enhance their conference papers significantly, with at least 30% extension, and submit the same for review. Of those only eight papers survived the review process and have been selected for inclusion in this Special Issue. The authors of these papers represent academic and/or research institutions from Bangladesh, Canada, Japan, Norway and the United States. These eight papers cover six domains of computing namely, application-driven algorithms, data mining, neural networks, distributed systems, content sharing and high-performance digital processors.
....