This book is a tribute to Lotfi A. Zadeh, the father of fuzzy logic, on the occasion of his 90th Birthday. The book gathers original scientific contributions written by top scientists and presenting the latest theories, applications and new trends in the fascinating and challenging field of soft computing.

Traditional artificial intelligence (AI) techniques are based around mathematical techniques of symbolic logic, with programming in languages such as Prolog and LISP invented in the 1960s. These are referred to as "crisp" techniques by the soft computing community. The new wave of AI methods seeks inspiration from the world of biology, and is being used to create numerous real-world intelligent systems with the aid of soft computing tools. These new methods are being increasingly taught at the upper end of the curriculum, sometimes as an adjunct to traditional AI courses, and sometimes as a replacement for them. Where a more radical approach is taken and the course is being taught at an introductory level, we have recently published Negnevitsky's book. Karray and Silva will be suitable for the majority of courses which will be found at an advanced level. Karray and de Silva cover the problem of control and intelligent systems design using soft-computing techniques in an integrated manner. They present both theory and applications, including industrial applications, and the book contains numerous worked examples, problems and case studies. Covering the state-of-the-art in soft-computing techniques, the book gives the reader sufficient knowledge to tackle a wide range of complex systems for which traditional techniques are inadequate.

The book provides a sample of research on the innovative theory and applications of soft computing paradigms. The idea of Soft Computing was initiated in 1981 when Professor Zadeh published his first paper on soft data analysis and constantly evolved ever since. Professor Zadeh defined Soft Computing as the fusion of the fields of fuzzy logic (FL), neural network theory (NN) and probabilistic reasoning (PR), with the latter subsuming belief networks, evolutionary computing including DNA computing, chaos theory and parts of learning theory into one multidisciplinary system. As Zadeh said the essence of soft computing is that unlike the traditional, hard computing, soft computing is aimed at an accommodation with the pervasive imprecision of the real world. Thus, the guiding principle of soft computing is to exploit the tolerance for imprecision, uncertainty and partial truth to achieve tractability, robustness, low solution cost and better rapport with reality. In the final analysis, the role model for soft computing is the human mind. We hope that the reader will share our excitement and find our volume both useful and inspiring.

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)

This book gathers authoritative contributions in the field of Soft Computing. Based on selected papers presented at the 7th World Conference on Soft Computing, which was held on May 29–31, 2018, in Baku, Azerbaijan, it describes new theoretical advances, as well as cutting-edge methods and applications. New theories and algorithms in fuzzy logic, cognitive modeling, graph theory and metaheuristics are discussed, and applications in data mining, social networks, control and robotics, geoscience, biomedicine and industrial management are described. This book offers a timely, broad snapshot of recent developments, including thought-provoking trends and challenges that are yielding new research directions in the diverse areas of Soft Computing.

The Springer Handbook for Computational Intelligence is the first book covering the basics, the state-of-the-art and important applications of the dynamic and rapidly expanding discipline of computational intelligence. This comprehensive handbook makes readers familiar with a broad spectrum of approaches to solve various problems in science and technology. Possible approaches include, for example, those being inspired by biology, living organisms and animate systems. Content is organized in seven parts: foundations; fuzzy logic; rough sets; evolutionary computation; neural networks; swarm intelligence and hybrid computational intelligence systems. Each Part is supervised by its own Part Editor(s) so that high-quality content as well as completeness are assured.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Scalable Uncertainty Management, SUM 2018, which was held in Milan, Italy, in October 2018. The 23 full, 6 short papers and 2 tutorials presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 37 submissions. The conference is dedicated to the management of large amounts of complex, uncertain, incomplete, or inconsistent information. New approaches have been developed on imprecise probabilities, fuzzy set theory, rough set theory, ordinal uncertainty representations, or even purely qualitative models.