Editorial
Welcome to the Special Issues on Soft Computing of the IEEE SMCS eNewsletter, which was organized by the Technical Committee on Soft Computing. Within this eNewsletter, you will find four contributions that reflect recent achievements or developments as well as the position of Soft Computing today. These contributions demonstrate that Soft Computing is still a prospering and expanding field of methodological developments for real-world applications. As it was noted very early, Soft Computing was never focusing on toy world scenarios, but always targeting complex application domains, where traditional - typically exact - approaches were demonstrated to be not applicable, or too expensive in terms of costs, resource usage, or computation time.
However, the field is too broad to be squeezed into some kinds of summary overview. Therefore, the contributions will all focus on exemplary application cases, and rather demonstrates the various aspects of such applications, be it complexity, integration, richness of computational concepts, or versatility in design.
The contribution, "Soft Computing Developments of the Applications of Fuzzy Logic and Evolutionary Algorithms Research Unit at the European Centre for Soft Computing," by Oscar Cordon, Sergio Damas, Raul Del Coso, Oscar Ibanez and Carmen Pena from European Centre for Soft Computing, Spain introduces the spectrum of the work of the group by applying Soft Computing to new application fields. Besides a general introduction to the European Centre for Soft Computing, the works on using fuzzy logic and evolutionary algorithms for forensic identification and medical imaging will be introduced.
The most essential source for many algorithms and techniques of Soft Computing is, simply said - nature. The contribution, "Hybrid Nature-Inspired Computation Methods for Optimization," by X. Wang, X. Z. Gao, and S. J. Ovaska from Helsinki University of Technology, Finland is focusing on this aspect, and gives an overview and taxonomy of nature-inspired computation methods.
Speaking about Soft Computing is also always speaking about integration. The contribution, "Soft Computing Techniques to Advance Non-Linear Mappings for Multivariate Data Visualization and Wireless Sensor Localization," by Kuncup Iswandy and Andreas König from University of Kaiserslautern, Germany points out the pivot points in systems, where the need for using advanced technologies for the goal of further improvement and using Soft Computing here becomes mandatory. The problem is discussed within the scope of sensor networks, and the target is similarity-preserving mapping into a lower dimensional space for the purpose of visualization.
Then, the contribution, "Online Detection of Contaminants in Packaged Foods with Ultrasound using Signal and Image Processing and Soft Computing," by Gauri S. Mittal, University of Guelph, and Otman Basir, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada presents an algorithmic complex approach to the detection of foreign bodies in processed foods.
It is our strong hope that these contributions can serve as examples for current activities in Soft Computing, and can provide some perspective beyond a simplified "imitation of nature" point of view, which is too often adopted for Soft Computing techniques. Soft Computing, as seen today, is never about pure algorithms alone but primarily about applications, and about the opening of new application fields.
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| Mario Köppen | Ajith Abraham | Hideyuki Takagi |
| Chairs of Technical Committee on Soft Computing | ||