| Computational Intelligence (CI) has emerged as a novel and highly diversified paradigm supporting the design, analysis and deployment of intelligent systems. The intellectual landscape of CI is enormously rich. The discipline of CI brings together technologies of granular computing including fuzzy sets and rough sets, neural networks, and evolutionary optimisation. The strength of CI hinges on the synergy between these technologies. The synergy (or hybridisation, as this term has been in frequent usage as well) helps exploit the advantages of the contributing technologies while reducing their possible limitations. Given the complementary nature of the research objectives of the three pillars of CI (with fuzzy sets focused on building granular interfaces and supporting the formation of the logic blueprints of intelligent systems, neural networks endowing the systems with very much required plasticity and learning abilities and evolutionary computing forming a unified environment of global optimisation), the hybridisation is the crux of the panoply of the ongoing developments. The progress in CI is rapid. The individual technologies evolve quite quickly paving a way to new interesting and truly amazing applications. In the heart of all of those is the principle of hybridisation. It is not surprising at all witnessing a lot of activities within this realm including a number of international conferences, workshops, symposia, and tutorials.
It is my genuine pleasure to introduce a new treatise on the subject of CI and its recent trends co-edited by two well-known researchers, Professors Mircea Gh. Negoita of Wellington Institute of Technology, Wellington, New Zealand, and Bernd Reusch of Dortmund University, Dortmund, Germany. Both of them have a successful track record in this area and are highly qualified for this job. It is needless to say that the book has immensely benefited from their own research, professional insights and practical experience. |
