Human-Centric Information Processing Through Granular Modelling

Information granules and their processing permeate a way in which we perceive the world, carryout processing at the conceptual (abstract) level, and communicate our findings to the surrounding environment. The importance of information granulation becomes even more apparent when we are faced with a rapidly growing flood of data, become challenged to make decisions in complex data settings and are required to appreciate the context from which the data is derived. Human centricity of systems that claim to be “intelligent” and the granular computing come hand in hand. It is not surprising at all to witness that the paradigm of Granular Computing has started to gain visibility and continues along this path by gathering interest from the circles of academics and practitioners. It is quite remarkable that the spectrum of application and research areas that have adopted information granulation as a successful strategy for dealing with information complexity covers such diverse fields as bioinformatics, image understanding, environmental monitoring, urban sustainability, to mention few most visible in the literature. Undoubtedly, there are two important aspects of Granular Computing that are worth stressing. First, there are several formalisms in which information granules are articulated so be intervals (sets), fuzzy sets, rough sets, soft sets, approximate sets, near sets and alike. They are complementary and each of them offers some interesting views at the complexity of the world and cyberspace.

The idea of Human-Centric Information Processing was prompted by the pioneering work of Zadeh Towards a theory of fuzzy information granulation and its centrality in human reasoning and fuzzy logic (1997). Since the publication of this work, a large number of researchers have focused on identifying the nature of information granulation and its specific relationship to human information processing. We now begin to witness the rich and manifold results of this concentrated research effort of the last decade.

This volume is intended to document the milestone contributions to human-centric information processing research and to demonstrate the emerging computational methods and the processing environments that arose from these research insights. The chapters, written by experts in the field, cover the fundamental methodologies, the new information processing paradigm, functional architectures of granular information processing and granular modeling applications.

The book provides a valuable reference for researchers, graduate students intending to focus on particular aspects of human-centric information processing from a broadly informed perspective and for practitioners to whom the breadth of coverage of topics will help inspire innovative applications.