An in-depth look at soft computing methods and their applications in the human sciences, such as the social and the behavioral sciences. Soft computing methods - including fuzzy systems, neural networks, evolutionary computing and probabilistic reasoning - are state-of-the-art methods in theory formation and model construction. The powerful application areas of these methods in the human sciences are demonstrated, including the replacement of statistical models by simpler numerical or linguistic soft computing models and the use of computer simulations with approximate and linguistic constituents. "Dr. Niskanen's work opens new vistas in application of soft computing, fuzzy logic and fuzzy set theory to the human sciences. This book is likely to be viewed in retrospect as a landmark in its field" (Lotfi A. Zadeh, Berkeley)

The field of Soft Computing in Humanities and Social Sciences is at a turning point. The strong distinction between “science” and “humanities” has been criticized from many fronts and, at the same time, an increasing cooperation between the so-called “hard sciences” and “soft sciences” is taking place in a wide range of scientific projects dealing with very complex and interdisciplinary topics. In the last fifteen years the area of Soft Computing has also experienced a gradual rapprochement to disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and also in the field of Medicine, Biology and even the Arts, a phenomenon that did not occur much in the previous years. The collection of this book presents a generous sampling of the new and burgeoning field of Soft Computing in Humanities and Social Sciences, bringing together a wide array of authors and subject matters from different disciplines. Some of the contributors of the book belong to the scientific and technical areas of Soft Computing while others come from various fields in the humanities and social sciences such as Philosophy, History, Sociology or Economics. Rudolf Seising received a Ph.D. degree in philosophy of science and a postdoctoral lecture qualification (PD) in history of science from the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich. He is an Adjoint Researcher at the European Centre for Soft Computing in Mieres (Asturias), Spain. Veronica Sanz earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University Complutense of Madrid (Spain). At the moment she is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Science, Technology and Society Center in the University of California at Berkeley. Veronica Sanz earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University Complutense of Madrid (Spain). At the moment she is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Science, Technology and Society Center in the University of California at Berkeley.

This book can be regarded as 'Soft computing for physicists and chemists self-taught'. It prepares the readers with a solid background of soft computing and how to adapt soft computing techniques to problem solving in physical and chemical research. Soft computing methods have been little explored by researchers in physical and chemical sciences primarily because of the absence of books that bridge the gap between the traditional computing paradigm pursued by researchers in science and the new soft computing paradigm that has emerged in computer science. This book is the interface between these primary sources and researchers in physics and chemistry.

This book plays a significant role in improvising human life to a great extent. The new applications of soft computing can be regarded as an emerging field in computer science, automatic control engineering, medicine, biology application, natural environmental engineering, and pattern recognition. Now, the exemplar model for soft computing is human brain. The use of various techniques of soft computing is nowadays successfully implemented in many domestic, commercial, and industrial applications due to the low-cost and very high-performance digital processors and also the decline price of the memory chips. This is the main reason behind the wider expansion of soft computing techniques and its application areas. These computing methods also play a significant role in the design and optimization in diverse engineering disciplines. With the influence and the development of the Internet of things (IoT) concept, the need for using soft computing techniques has become more significant than ever. In general, soft computing methods are closely similar to biological processes than traditional techniques, which are mostly based on formal logical systems, such as sentential logic and predicate logic, or rely heavily on computer-aided numerical analysis. Soft computing techniques are anticipated to complement each other. The aim of these techniques is to accept imprecision, uncertainties, and approximations to get a rapid solution. However, recent advancements in representation soft computing algorithms (fuzzy logic,evolutionary computation, machine learning, and probabilistic reasoning) generate a more intelligent and robust system providing a human interpretable, low-cost, approximate solution. Soft computing-based algorithms have demonstrated great performance to a variety of areas including multimedia retrieval, fault tolerance, system modelling, network architecture, Web semantics, big data analytics, time series, biomedical and health informatics, etc. Soft computing approaches such as genetic programming (GP), support vector machine–firefly algorithm (SVM-FFA), artificial neural network (ANN), and support vector machine–wavelet (SVM–Wavelet) have emerged as powerful computational models. These have also shown significant success in dealing with massive data analysis for large number of applications. All the researchers and practitioners will be highly benefited those who are working in field of computer engineering, medicine, biology application, signal processing, and mechanical engineering. This book is a good collection of state-of-the-art approaches for soft computing-based applications to various engineering fields. It is very beneficial for the new researchers and practitioners working in the field to quickly know the best performing methods. They would be able to compare different approaches and can carry forward their research in the most important area of research which has direct impact on betterment of the human life and health. This book is very useful because there is no book in the market which provides a good collection of state-of-the-art methods of soft computing-based models for multimedia retrieval, fault tolerance, system modelling, network architecture, Web semantics, big data analytics, time series, and biomedical and health informatics.

Science has made great progress in the twentieth century, with the establishment of proper disciplines in the fields of physics, computer science, molecular biology, and many others. At the same time, there have also emerged many engineering ideas that are interdisciplinary in nature, beyond the realm of such orthodox disciplines. These in clude, for example, artificial intelligence, fuzzy logic, artificial neural networks, evolutional computation, data mining, and so on. In or der to generate new technology that is truly human-friendly in the twenty-first century, integration of various methods beyond specific disciplines is required. Soft computing is a key concept for the creation of such human friendly technology in our modern information society. Professor Rutkowski is a pioneer in this field, having devoted himself for many years to publishing a large variety of original work. The present vol ume, based mostly on his own work, is a milestone in the devel opment of soft computing, integrating various disciplines from the fields of information science and engineering. The book consists of three parts, the first of which is devoted to probabilistic neural net works. Neural excitation is stochastic, so it is natural to investi gate the Bayesian properties of connectionist structures developed by Professor Rutkowski. This new approach has proven to be par ticularly useful for handling regression and classification problems vi Preface in time-varying environments. Throughout this book, major themes are selected from theoretical subjects that are tightly connected with challenging applications.

This book comprises a selection of papers on theoretical advances and applications of fuzzy logic and soft computing from the IFSA 2007 World Congress, held in Cancun, Mexico, June 2007. These papers constitute an important contribution to the theory and applications of fuzzy logic and soft computing methodologies.

Soft computing, as opposed to conventional "hard" computing, tolerates imprecision and uncertainty, in a way very much similar to the human mind. Soft computing techniques include neural networks, evolutionary computation, fuzzy logic, and chaos. The recent years have witnessed tremendous success of these powerful methods in virtually all areas of science and technology, as evidenced by the large numbers of research results published in a variety of journals, conferences, as weil as many excellent books in this book series on Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing. This volume is dedicated to recent novel applications of soft computing in communications. The book is organized in four Parts, i.e., (1) neural networks, (2) evolutionary computation, (3) fuzzy logic and neurofuzzy systems, and (4) kernel methods. Artificial neural networks consist of simple processing elements called neurons, which are connected by weights that may be adjusted during learning. Part 1 of the book has seven chapters, demonstrating some of the capabilities of two major types of neural networks, i.e., multiplayer perceptron (MLP) neural networks and Hopfield-type neural networks.