Special Issue on

The Impact of Soft Computing for the Progress of Artificial Intelligence

On the 31st August 1955, J. McCarthy (Dartmouth College, New Hampshire), M.L. Minsky (Harvard University), N. Rochester (I.B.M. Corporation) and C.E. Shannon (Bell Telephone Laboratories) proposed a meeting to a group of researchers to be held in the summer of 1956 in order to provide ideas on each aspect of learning and each feature of intelligence capable of being simulated on machines. During the encounter, later known as the Dartmouth Conference, the term Artificial Intelligence (AI) was coined. In 2006, the 50th anniversary of the Dartmouth Conference will be celebrated worldwide.

Within the Artificial Intelligence discipline, it can be found a wide and young area of research called Soft Computing (SC), which deals with the design of hybrid intelligent systems that, opposite to classical hard computing techniques, are tolerant to imprecision, uncertainty, partial truth, and approximation, and exploit this tolerance to achieve tractability, robustness and low solution cost. The main constituents of SC are Fuzzy Logic (FL), Neural Computing (NC), Evolutionary Computation (EC), Machine Learning (ML) and Probabilistic Reasoning (PR). However, more important than the areas that constitute SC is the fact that they are complementary rather than competitive, being remarkable the way in which each partner contributes a distinct methodology for addressing problems in its domain.

During these 50 years of AI the role played by the different areas of SC have been quite different, thus, some of them as NC or machine learning were hot topics of research since the beginning, while research on FL and fuzzy systems or in EC started later, and some of them have experimented remarkable revivals as PR with the appearance of belief/Bayesian networks during the late eighties. Therefore, SC has been a highly dynamic field of research and nowadays it is almost impossible to think about AI without thinking about SC.

The ASOC special issue on “The impact of Soft Computing for the progress of Artificial Intelligence” is intended to provide a forum for researchers to report recent advances and exchange knowledge in the field of SC in close relation to the state-of-the-art of AI in its 50th anniversary. In this sense the following type of papers are especially welcome:

where by SC techniques we (mainly) refer to:

Important Dates:

Method of Review: NEW

Submissions will be handled electronically through the EES (Elsevier Editorial System). When uploading a paper, the corresponding author has to choose the so-called Article Type: "Special Issue: Impact of Soft Computing" (drop down menu) in the EES system. It is also wise to type in the paper comment field: This submission is part of the special issue "The Impact of Soft Computing for the Progress of Artificial Intelligence".

The Guest Editors will first evaluate all manuscripts. Those manuscripts that meet the minimum criteria are passed on for peer review by two external experts. As there is no bias from the Guest Editors towards any paper, these will be reviewed by independent reviewers. The method of review in this special issue will employ single blind review, where the referee remains anonymous throughout the process. The Guest Editors board is responsible for the final decision to accept or reject the article, based on the recommendations of the reviewers.

Guest Editors:

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