In 1982, Professor Pawlak published his seminal paper on what he called "rough sets" - a work which opened a new direction in the development of theories of incomplete information. Today, a decade and a half later, the theory of rough sets has evolved into a far-reaching methodology for dealing with a wide variety of issues centering on incompleteness and imprecision of information - issues which playa key role in the conception and design of intelligent information systems. "Incomplete Information: Rough Set Analysis" - or RSA for short - presents an up-to-date and highly authoritative account of the current status of the basic theory, its many extensions and wide-ranging applications. Edited by Professor Ewa Orlowska, one of the leading contributors to the theory of rough sets, RSA is a collection of nineteen well-integrated chapters authored by experts in rough set theory and related fields. A common thread that runs through these chapters ties the concept of incompleteness of information to those of indiscernibility and similarity.

Information fusion is becoming a major requirement in data mining and knowledge discovery in databases. This book presents some recent fusion techniques that are currently in use in data mining, as well as data mining applications that use information fusion. Special focus of the book is on information fusion in preprocessing, model building and information extraction with various applications.

Approximate reasoning is a key motivation in fuzzy sets and possibility theory. This volume provides a coherent view of this field, and its impact on database research and information retrieval. First, the semantic foundations of approximate reasoning are presented. Special emphasis is given to the representation of fuzzy rules and specialized types of approximate reasoning. Then syntactic aspects of approximate reasoning are surveyed and the algebraic underpinnings of fuzzy consequence relations are presented and explained. The second part of the book is devoted to inductive and neuro-fuzzy methods for learning fuzzy rules. It also contains new material on the application of possibility theory to data fusion. The last part of the book surveys the growing literature on fuzzy information systems. Each chapter contains extensive bibliographical material. Fuzzy Sets in Approximate Reasoning and Information Systems is a major source of information for research scholars and graduate students in computer science and artificial intelligence, interested in human information processing.

Information fusion resulting from multi-source processing, often called multisensor data fusion when sensors are the main sources of information, is a relatively young (less than 20 years) technology domain. It provides techniques and methods for: Integrating data from multiple sources and using the complementarity of this data to derive maximum information about the phenomenon being observed; Analyzing and deriving the meaning of these observations; Selecting the best course of action; and Controlling the actions. Various sensors have been designed to detect some specific phenomena, but not others. Data fusion applications can combine synergically information from many sensors, including data provided by satellites and contextual and encyclopedic knowledge, to provide enhanced ability to detect and recognize anomalies in the environment, compared with conventional means. Data fusion is an integral part of multisensor processing, but it can also be applied to fuse non-sensor information (geopolitical, intelligence, etc.) to provide decision support for a timely and effective situation and threat assessment. One special field of application for data fusion is satellite imagery, which can provide extensive information over a wide area of the electromagnetic spectrum using several types of sensors (Visible, Infra-Red (IR), Thermal IR, Radar, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), Polarimetric SAR (PolSAR), Hyperspectral...). Satellite imagery provides the coverage rate needed to identify and monitor human activities from agricultural practices (land use, crop types identification...) to defence-related surveillance (land/sea target detection and classification). By acquiring remotely sensed imagery over earth regions that land sensors cannot access, valuable information can be gathered for the defence against terrorism. This books deals with the following research areas: Target recognition/classification and tracking; Sensor systems; Image processing; Remote sensing and remote control; Belief functions theory; and Situation assessment.

Since the turn of the century, geology has advanced dramatically, with materials derived from extra-terrestrial sources meaning that it now encompasses cosmology, and new technologies providing ever more sophisticated possibilities for the conducting of research. This book, Unconventional Methods for Geoscience, Shale Gas and Petroleum in the 21st Century, aims to provide research directions for geology in the 21st century. As Eric Hobsbawm wrote, it is difficult to write the history of one’s own days, and selecting influential methods was no easy task, but an attempt has been made to include the most influential papers that represent the smart geology of the first few decades of the 21st century. The book presents 22 papers; the first serves as an introduction to biology, which is now expanding into the science of the cosmos following the discovery of previously missing information, and the remaining 21 papers are divided into 3 sections entitled Modelling, Simulation and Optimization. The importance of theoretical approaches from physics, mathematics, and statistics underlying meta-heuristic methods, knowledge and approaches is acknowledged, and there is a chapter dedicated to deep learning. The book contributes to the exploration of various possible solutions to challenging problems in both the Earth’s geology and that of the cosmos, and will be of interest to all those working in the field.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing, ICAISC 2008, held in Zakopane, Poland, in June 2008. The 116 revised contributed papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 320 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on neural networks and their applications, fuzzy systems and their applications, evolutionary algorithms and their applications, classification, rule discovery and clustering, image analysis, speech and robotics, bioinformatics and medical applications, various problems of artificial intelligence, and agent systems.