These two volumes consisting of Foundations and Applications provide the current status of theoretical and empirical developments in "computing with words". In philosophy, the twentieth century is said to be the century of language. This is mainly due to Wittgenstein who said: "The meaning of a word is its use in the language game". "The concept game is a concept with blurred edges". In the first phrase, "the language game" implies the everyday human activity with language, and in the latter, "game" simply implies an ordinary word. Thus, Wittgenstein precisely stated that a word is fuzzy in real life. Unfortunately this idea about a word was not accepted in the conventional science. We had to wait for Zadeh's fuzzy sets theory. Remembering Wittgenstein's statement, we should consider, on the one hand, the concept of "computing with words" from a philosophical point of view. It deeply relates to the everyday use of a word in which the meaning of a word is fuzzy in its nature.

The volume is the first one in the world literature which is a comprehensive, up to date account on computing with words, a new direction in broadly perceived intelligent systems, proposed and advocated by Professor Zadeh, the founder of fuzzy sets theory and fuzzy logic. Computing with words may form a basis of a computational theory of perception inspired by a remarkable human ability to perform a wide variety of tasks on the basis of vague and imprecise information expressed in natural language. In Part 2, applications in a wide array of fields are presented which use the paradigm of computing with words, exemplified by reasoning, data analysis, data mining, machine learning, risk analyses, reliability and quality control, decision making, optimization and control, databases, medical diagnosis, business analyses, traffic management, power system planning, military applications, etc.

The book reports on new theories and applications in the field of intelligent systems and computing. It covers computational and artificial intelligence methods, as well as advances in computer vision, current issue in big data and cloud computing, computation linguistics, cyber-physical systems as well as topics in intelligent information management. Written by active researchers, the different chapters are based on contributions presented at the workshop in intelligent systems and computing (ISC), held during CSIT 2016, September 6-9, and jointly organized by the Lviv Polytechnic National University, Ukraine, the Kharkiv National University of Radio Electronics, Ukraine, and the Technical University of Lodz, Poland, under patronage of Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine. All in all, the book provides academics and professionals with extensive information and a timely snapshot of the field of intelligent systems, and it is expected to foster new discussions and collaborations among different groups.

We describe in this book, hybrid intelligent systems based mainly on type-2 fuzzy logic for intelligent control. Hybrid intelligent systems combine several intelligent computing paradigms, including fuzzy logic, and bio-inspired optimization algorithms, which can be used to produce powerful automatic control systems. The book is organized in three main parts, which contain a group of chapters around a similar subject. The first part consists of chapters with the main theme of theory and design algorithms, which are basically chapters that propose new models and concepts, which can be the basis for achieving intelligent control with interval type-2 fuzzy logic. The second part of the book is comprised of chapters with the main theme of evolutionary optimization of type-2 fuzzy systems in intelligent control with the aim of designing optimal type-2 fuzzy controllers for complex control problems in diverse areas of application, including mobile robotics, aircraft dynamics systems and hardware implementations. The third part of the book is formed with chapters dealing with the theme of bio-inspired optimization of type-2 fuzzy systems in intelligent control, which includes the application of particle swarm intelligence and ant colony optimization algorithms for obtaining optimal type-2 fuzzy controllers.

In essence, Computing with Words (CWW) is a system of computation in which the objects of computation are predominantly words, phrases and propositions drawn from a natural language. CWW is based on fuzzy logic. In science there is a deep-seated tradition of according much more respect to numbers than to words. In a fundamental way, CWW is a challenge to this tradition. What is not widely recognized is that, today, words are used in place of numbers in a wide variety of applications ranging from digital cameras and household appliances to fraud detection systems, biomedical instrumentation and subway trains. CWW offers a unique capability—the capability to precisiate natural language. Unprecisiated (raw) natural language cannot be computed with. A key concept which underlies precisiation of meaning is that of the meaning postulate: A proposition, p, is a restriction on the values which a variable, X—a variable which is implicit in p—is allowed to take. CWW has an important ramification for mathematics. Addition of the formalism of CWW to mathematics empowers mathematics to construct mathematical solutions of computational problems which are stated in a natural language. Traditional mathematics does not have this capability.