Preface

This volume constitutes the proceedings of the 7th Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing, ICAISC 2004, held in Zakopane, Poland, June 7–11, 2004. The conference was organized by the Polish Neural Network Society in cooperation with the Department of Computer Engineering at the Technical University of Czȩstochowa, WSHE University in Lódź and IEEE Neural Networks Society. The previous conferences took place in Kule (1994), Szczyrk (1996), Kule (1997) and Zakopane (1999, 2000, 2002) and attracted a large number of papers and internationally recognized speakers: Prof. Lotfi A. Zadeh, Prof. Robert Marks, Prof. Enrique Ruspini, Prof. Zdzis law Bubnicki, Prof. Jacek Żurada, Prof. Shun-ichi Amari, Prof. Kaoru Hirota, Prof. Ryszard Tadeusiewicz, Prof. Shiro Usui, Prof. W lodzis law Duch, Prof. Erkki Oja, Prof. Syozo Yasui, Prof. Witold Pedrycz, Prof. Janusz Kacprzyk, Prof. Laszlo T. Koczy, Prof. SooYoung Lee and Prof. Daniel Amit. The aim of this conference is to build a bridge between traditional artificial intelligence techniques and recently developed soft computing techniques. It was pointed out by Prof. Lotfi A. Zadeh that “Soft Computing (SC) is a coalition of methodologies which are oriented toward the conception and design of information/intelligent systems. The principal members of the coalition are: fuzzy logic (FL), neurocomputing (NC), evolutionary computing (EC), probabilistic computing (PC), chaotic computing (CC), and machine learning (ML). The constituent methodologies of SC are, for the most part, complementary and synergistic rather than competitive”. This volume presents both traditional artificial intelligence methods and soft computing techniques presented in 14 parts: