Intelligent Systems: From Theory to Practice (Studies in Computational Intelligence, 299)

In the modern science and technology there are some research directions and ch- lenges which are at the forefront of world wide research activities because of their relevance. This relevance may be related to different aspects. First, from a point of view of researchers it can be implied by just an analytic or algorithmic difficulty in the solution of problems within an area. From a broader perspective, this re- vance can be related to how important problems and challenges in a particular area are to society, corporate or national competitiveness, etc. Needless to say that the latter, more global challenges are probably more decisive a driving force for s- ence seen from a global perspective. One of such “meta-challenges” in the present world is that of intelligent s- tems. For a long time it has been obvious that the complexity of our world and the speed of changes we face in virtually all processes that have impact on our life imply a need to automate many tasks and processes that have been so far limited to human beings because they require some sort of intelligence.

This volume contains a selection of peer reviewed most interesting extended versions of papers presented at IEEE-IS’2008 complemented with some relevant works of top people who have not attended the conference. The topics covered include virtually all areas that are considered to be relevant for the development of broadly perceived intelligent systems. They start from logical foundations, including works on classical and non-classical logics, notably fuzzy and intuitionistic fuzzy logic, and – more generally – foundations of computational intelligence and soft computing. A significant part of about 30 contributions included in this volume is concerned with intelligent autonomous agents, multi-agent systems, and ontologies. Issues related to intelligent control, intelligent knowledge discovery and data mining, and neural/fuzzy-neural networks are discussed in many papers. Intelligent decision support systems, sensor systems, group decision making and negotiations, etc. are also discussed. Much attention has been paid to a very promising direction in the area of intelligent systems, namely that of hybrid systems that through a synergistic combination of best features and strengths of particular approaches help attain a new functionality, effectiveness and efficiency.