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Firms engaging in international trade are subject to risk from fluctuation of currency exchange rates. Although such risk can be actively managed with suitable hedging strategies, the problem is a complex one, and small firms rarely have access to required expertise. This paper proposes a hybrid intelligent system, called HYNES, which integrates neural network and expert system technologies, to support exchange rate risk management in small firms. The three phases of the development of HYNES, the analysis, design and implementation, are briefly discussed, giving some attention to the open problems of general intelligent systems development.

An abstract data modelling approach to the problems of econometric measurement, and system definition and analysis, is proposed. The approach is based on an extension of classical ideas of mathematical systems theories, developed for the purpose of laying formal foundations for a theory of information systems. In the proposed approach, an economic system is defined by the measurement data, and can be meaningfully discussed and, with the help of computing tools, also processed, even before statistical redundancy reductions have been made. A distinctive feature of the formalism is the separation of local and global analyses of the system variables.

Within decades, the emerging Distributed Multimedia Technology (DMT) will cause major changesin the global economy and in the social and political structures. The inevitable metamorphosis of the‘knowledge industry’, which schools and universities are part of, should be particularly dramatic.Short-term economic arguments suggest that the physical and administrative structures defininginstitutions of higher learning today may soon become redundant as knowledge becomes a fluentcommodity for ‘just in time’ delivery. Opposing this trend is the considerable inertia of theeducational system, its internal power structures, and the limited technological knowledge of theeducators. Calling for moderation are also theoretical arguments representing traditional academic andmoral values.

Electronic group support systems (GSS) are distributed computer technologies, developed to supportcooperative work in organisations, predominantly in a business environment. Electronic meetingsystems (EMS), for example, are GSS specifically developed to support meetings. The considerableexperience gathered from the use of GSS in business is briefly summarised and discussed, with theaim of determining the potential use of this technology in university education. The current transfer ofthe GSS technology into universities is critically examined, in particular in the perspective of therapidly emerging global platform of distributed multimedia technology. The discussion isexemplified with the GroupSystems EMS developed at the University of Arizona, USA.

Despite the emphasis on securities rather than on cash streams in general financialtheories, the concept of cash stream remains useful in modelling realistic financial decision problems.The paper presents a unified view on cash stream modelling, valid in both continuous and discretetime, in the standard analytical framework of Schwartz distributions. Abstract cash stream spacesare defined by stipulating certain general properties, and are then identified as some well-knownLebesgue lattices of measures on the real line. All basic financial notions such as discounting orpreference ordering carry over to the general case, and the linear decision problems become instancesof infinite-dimensional linear programming.