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During last decade significant progress has been made in the oil indus­ try by using soft computing technology. Underlying this evolving technology there have, been ideas transforming the very language we use to describe problems with imprecision, uncertainty and partial truth. These developments offer exciting opportunities, but at the same time it is becoming clearer that further advancements are confronted by funda­ mental problems. The whole idea of how human process information lies at the core of the challenge. There are already new ways of thinking about the problems within theory of perception-based information. This theory aims to understand and harness the laws of human perceptions to dramatically im­ prove the processing of information. A matured theory of perception-based information is likely to be proper positioned to contribute to the solution of the problems and provide all the ingredients for a revolution in science, technology and business. In this context, Berkeley Initiative in Soft Computing (BISC), Univer­ sity of California, Berkeley from one side and Chevron-Texaco from another formed a Technical Committee to organize a Meeting entitled'State of the Art Assessment and New Directions for Research'to understand the signifi­ cance of the fields accomplishments, new developments and future directions. The Technical Committee selected and invited 15 scientists (and oil indus­ try experts as technical committee members) from the related disciplines to participate in the Meeting, which took place at the University of California, Berkeley, and March 15-17, 2002.

During the last decade significant progress has been made in Internet technology by using computational intelligence methods. This book presents reports from the front of soft computing in the Internet industry and covers important topics in the field such as search engines, fuzzy query, decision analysis and support systems as well as e-business and e-commerce. The articles are selected results from a recent workshop (Fuzzy Logic and the Internet - FLINT 2001) related to the Internet Fuzzy Logic hosted by the Berkeley Initiative in Soft Computing (BISC) program. The main purpose of the Workshop was to draw the attention of the fuzzy logic community as well as the Internet community to the fundamental importance of specific Internet-related problems including search engines, user modeling and personal information provision, e-commerce, e-business, e-health, semantic web/net, web-assistant and agents, knowledge representation for e-learning, content-based information retrieval, information organization, intrusion detection and network management. The book presents a collection of challenging problems and new directions toward the next generation of search engines and the Internet.

With the daily addition of million documents and new users, there is no doubt that the World Wide Web (WWW or Web shortly) is still expanding its global information infrastructure. Thanks to low-cost wireless technology, the Web is no more limited to homes or offices, but it is simply everywhere. The Web is so large and growing so rapidly that the 40 million page'WebBase'repository of Inktomi corresponds to only about 4% of the estimated size of the publicly indexable Web as of January 2000 and there is every reason to believe these numbers will all swell significantly in the next few years. This unrestrainable explosion is not bereft of troubles and drawbacks, especially for inexpert users. Probably the most critical problem is the effectiveness of Web search engines: though the Web is rich in providing numerous services, the primary use of the Internet falls in emails and information retrieval activities. Focusing in this latter, any user has felt the frustrating experience to see as result of a search query overwhelming numbers of pages that satisfy the query but that are irrelevant to the user.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing, ICAISC 2008, held in Zakopane, Poland, in June 2008. The 116 revised contributed papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 320 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on neural networks and their applications, fuzzy systems and their applications, evolutionary algorithms and their applications, classification, rule discovery and clustering, image analysis, speech and robotics, bioinformatics and medical applications, various problems of artificial intelligence, and agent systems.

Everyonelovesagoodcompetition. AsIwritethis,twobillionfansareeagerly anticipating the 2006 World Cup. Meanwhile, a fan base that is somewhat smaller (but presumably includes you, dear reader) is equally eager to read all about the results of the NIPS 2003 Feature Selection Challenge, contained herein. Fans of Radford Neal and Jianguo Zhang (or of Bayesian neural n- works and Dirichlet di?usion trees) are gloating “I told you so” and looking forproofthattheirwinwasnota?uke. Butthematterisbynomeanssettled, and fans of SVMs are shouting “wait'til next year!” You know this book is a bit more edgy than your standard academic treatise as soon as you see the dedication: “To our friends and foes. ” Competition breeds improvement. Fifty years ago, the champion in 100m butter?yswimmingwas22percentslowerthantoday'schampion;thewomen's marathon champion from just 30 years ago was 26 percent slower. Who knows how much better our machine learning algorithms would be today if Turing in 1950 had proposed an e?ective competition rather than his elusive Test? But what makes an e?ective competition? The?eld of Speech Recognition hashadNIST-runcompetitionssince1988;errorrateshavebeenreducedbya factorofthreeormore,butthe?eldhasnotyethadtheimpactexpectedofit. Information Retrieval has had its TREC competition since 1992; progress has been steady and refugees from the competition have played important roles in the hundred-billion-dollar search industry. Robotics has had the DARPA Grand Challenge for only two years, but in that time we have seen the results go from complete failure to resounding success (although it may have helped that the second year's course was somewhat easier than the?rst's).

The 2005 BISC International Special Event-BISCSE'05 “Forging the frontiers” was held in the University of California, Berkeley, “Where fuzzy logic began”, from November 3-6, 2005. The successful applications of fuzzy logic and it's rapid growth suggest that the impact of fuzzy logic will be felt increasingly in coming years. Fuzzy logic is likely to play an especially important role in science and engineering, but eventually its influence may extend much farther. In many ways, fuzzy logic represents a significant paradigm shift in the aims of computing - a shift which reflects the fact that the human mind, unlike present day computers, possesses a remarkable ability to store and process information which is pervasively imprecise, uncertain and lacking in categoricity. The chapters of the book are evolved from presentations made by selected participants at the meeting and organized in two books. The papers include reports from the different front of soft computing in various industries and address the problems of different fields of research in fuzzy logic, fuzzy set and soft computing. The book provides a collection of forty four (44) articles in two volumes.

The primary goal of this book is to present to the scientific and management communities a selection of applications using more recent Soft Computing (SC) and Computing with Words and Perceptions (CWP) models and techniques meant to solve the economics and financial problems. The selected examples could also serve as a starting point or as an opening out, in the SC and CWP techniques application to a wider range of problems in economics and finance. Decision making in the present world is becoming more and more sophisticated, time consuming and difficult for human beings who require more and more computational support. This book addresses the significant increase on research and applications of Soft Computing and Computing with Words and Perceptions for decision making in Economics and Finance in recent years. Decision making is heavily based on information and knowledge usually extracted from the analysis of large amounts of data. Data mining techniques enabled with the capability to integrate human experience could be used for a more realistic business decision support. Computing with Words and Perceptions introduced by Lotfi Zadeh, can serve as a basis for such extension of traditional data mining and decision making systems. Fuzzy logic as a main constituent of CWP gives powerful tools for modeling and processing linguistic information defined on numerical domain.

Search engines, with Google at the top, have become the most heavily used online service, with millions of searches performed every day and many remarkable capabilities. Soft Computing for Information Processing and Analysis includes reports from the front of soft computing in the internet industry and imparts knowledge and understanding of the significance of the field's accomplishments, new developments and future directions. This carefully edited book has evolved from presentations made by the participants of a meeting entitled'Fuzzy Logic and the Internet: Enhancing the Power of the Internet', organized by the Berkeley Initiative in Soft Computing (BISC), University of California, Berkeley. It addresses the important topics of modern search engines such as fuzzy query, decision analysis and support systems, including articles about topics such as Web Intelligence, World Knowledge and Fuzzy Logic (by Lotfi A. Zadeh), perception based information processing, or web intelligence.