Fuzzy-Logic Books

Buckley and Feuring have written a concise and understandable presentation of the essential mathematics involved in artificial neural nets (fuzzy and conventional), in fuzzy expert systems, and in hybrid systems employing both techniques. The book is most valuable for those seriously interested in such systems whose mathematics is primarily of the engineering variety. A real virtue is that the options available in the design phase are spelled out; it is not assumed that the system designer will follow the conventional well-trodden path. The example given of a fuzzy teaching machine illustrates choosing among these options. The treatment of neural nets is especially good; I would wish that the treatment of fuzzy expert systems had been expanded beyond bare necessity. Useful adjunct reading is Earl Cox's Fuzzy Systems Handbook and von Altrock's Fuzzy Logic and NeuroFuzzy Applications.

While much of the basic mathematics is available in other books such as Klir and Yuan, it is quite difficult to locate what one needs to know in these books. Buckley and Feuring's presentation has the great virtue that the math is organized in a fashion appropriate to the system designer's needs. I know of no other book which fills this niche.

The monograph, containing interdisciplinary studies on the use of neuro-fuzzy paradigm in medicine and biomedical applications, is structured in three parts and is composed of contributed papers by independent teams of researchers. It creates a bridge between two scientific communities, information technology researchers, on one side and specialists in medicine and biomedical engineering, on the other side, filling a gap that originates in the lack of communication between the two parties. The book brings to the reader contributions by researchers who have been active in the field in the past few years. The list of authors comprises 35 researchers affiliated to outstanding research and academic institutions that cover a very wide geographic area. The monograph addresses a large range of readers, including fuzzy - engineering community, researchers in medicine and biomedical engineering, teachers, doctoral students. Each chapter is provided with an extended list of references, and most of contributed papers contain comprehensive explanation of terminology. At the end of the book, a very rich index of terms is given. A very good idea is having a section that introduces the contributors to the reader, so the papers can be placed in the larger context of their scientific work. We state that the monograph is a major contribution to the dissemination of knowledge in the scientific community; no doubt that we face an editorial event. The book may be regarded as a good acquisition for the reader involved in the approached scientific domains.

Florin Grigoras, PhD, research engineer,

Institute for Theoretical Informatics, Romanian Academy, Iasi Branch, Romania

This work is a magnificent epic for the mind that traces the lineage of one man's search for meaning - that strangely mirrors the evolution of an academic subject. Lovers of language are in for a real feast, as the author weaves a beautiful web of words.

The reader takes part in a multifaceted task of understanding the structures of scientific thought and the magical ways in which words dictate what we think. Fuzzy Sets takes place on the borderlands of the intellect, where things are not always as they appear. Explore your thought patterns and the systems of thought that either keep you restrained, or set you free.

If you enjoy works that delightfully peel back layers of information to discover what lies beneath, this book will richly satisfy.

I liked the book very much specially for the chapters on neurofuzzy computations (chapter 3 and 4).The last chapter on fuzzy Petri nets is also interesting.

I find the approach in this book to fuzzy logic interesting, useful, simple, and beautiful. Starting with something like interval numbers is almost certainly the best way to start a fuzzy logic text. It presents a simple example that is very easily understood and allows one to see what differentiates fuzzy logic from other multi-valued logics in an almost intuitive manner.
I have not worked through all of this book. But, while working through the truth table exercises in Chapter 8 I thought 'couldn't I do these on a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Works?' With Bojadziev's formulations how to produce truth tables on a spread sheet (I used Microsoft Works) came almost immediately. (The only real exception was that I had to treat fractional truth values, as functions. Expressly, in Works you type =1/2 in the cell.) To paraphrase Betrand Russell (correct this if I have the author wrong), 'a good notation has a certain suggestion to it.'
Since I did this, I noticed some textual errors. p. 164, (g) reads [~p->(q^~q)]->~p proof by contradiction. This is not a tautology. The tautological form, I think, Bojadziev is looking for is either [p->(q^~q)]->~p, or more likely [~p->(q^~q)]->p. Also, on p. 165 p^(p->q) should not read (1 0 1 0, which is q^(p->q) in context), but
1
0
0
0. Additionally, on p. 267 8.5 (a) for p->~q should read
(0 1/2 1 1/2 1 1 1 1 1).
Still, Bojadziev's notation is the most helpful I have seen for fuzzy logic texts. The notation helped me to think of simpler ways to deal with truth tables. This also allowed me to check many different forms of tautologies and see if they are tautologies in other than 2-value logics. For instance, modus tollens is only a quasi-tautology in greater than 2-valued logics (I have investigated up to 11-valued logics, and no doubt, this could be proven for all n-valued crisp logics). Modus ponens is a tautology for n-valued logics, where n is greater than 2 (at least up to an 11-valued logic, and no doubt this can be proven). This suggests, on a logical basis, that falsifiability is not as strong a criterion as verification. Without this book, such insights would have not happened or would have been much harder.

The control is focused on the following items:
1, To maintain a stable coal dust combustion with higher efficiency.
2, To simultaneously control the stagged air/coal ratio in order to NOx production
3, To configulation of the flame profile for proper heat absorption in boiler furnace

This book excellent for anyone interested in the complex and unique world of hybrid systems. Wolf Kohn is simply brilliant! Reccomended.

Rough sets analysis for imag

INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS AND INTERFACES Edited by

HORIA-NICOLAI TEODORESCU University of South Florida (USF)

DANIEL MLYNEK Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL)

ABRAHAM KANDEL University of South Florida

And H.-J. ZIMMERMANN RWTH

Published by KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS /BOSTON / DORDRECHT / LONDON P.O. Box 17,3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands 2000, ISBN 0-7923-7763-X, pp. 451

Sold and distributed: in North, Central and South America by Kluwer Academic Publishers, 101 Philip Drive, Norwell, MA 02061, U.S.A. and in all other countries by Kluwer Academic Publishers, P.O. Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrecht, The Netherlands.

"Intelligent interfaces and systems" constitute important topics in the last decade artificial intelligence conferences. The field is developing both by the increasing number of applications and by their complex capabilities as intelligent agents, speech and image understanding, environment decision making, bio-inspired sensor and neuro-fuzzy systems.

The volume is addressing a very wide range of scientists, employing both theoretical and practical aspects, experienced knowledge in building and using intelligent systems.

The Editors (well-known personalities in the artificial intelligence field, with a prodigious scientific activity authors of many books, tutorials and papers) selected fundamental aspects, software-, sensors-, and hardware-related issues, in order to realize a comprehensive coverage of the field.

The volume is organized in four sections each of them being structured in more chapters.

The first two chapters of the section "Intelligent agents and bio-inspired systems" deal with aspects of building and using various types of "intelligent agents". Chapter 1: "A tutoring based approach to the development of intelligent agents" particularly presents "Disciple", an apprenticeship, multistrategy learning system mend to develop intelligent agents (supervised learning - through examples, explanations and corrections - for specific tasks). Machine learning and knowledge acquisition techniques (inductive, explanation-based, analogy, experimentation) are employed. Chapter 2: "An object-oriented framework for building collaborative network agents" is developed on the design of software agents supporting interoperability in a heterogeneous computing system with a dynamically creating agents mechanism. In the third chapter "Navigation: Animals as Autonomous Robots" - animats (intelligent systems that mimic animal behavior) carry out complex spatial-navigation tasks (multiple target finding, barrier detour and maze learning) in a discrete (in time and space) diffusion surface. The system has been proposed as a guidance schema for the efficient identification of suspected land mines. The fourth chapter "From configurable circuits to bio-inspired systems" describes six applications in the domain of configurable computing, considering both static systems (SPYDER - REconfigurable Processor Development System, RENCO - REconfigurable Network Computer, FPGA - based backpropagation neural network), and dynamic systems (The Firefly machine, The Bio Watch and The FAST Neural Network -Flexible, Adaptable-Size Topology).

The second section of the volume is devoted to "Intelligent data processing". In chapter 5, "Fuzzy Data Mining", fuzzy inference procedures are used to process the extraction of useful information from databases. Chapters 6 and 7 "Feature-oriented hybrid neural adaptive systems and applications" and, respectively, "Algebraic neuro-fuzzy systems and applications", describes feature-space, neuro, neuro-fuzzy and hybrid methods in intelligent data processing, and demonstrates different applications ranging from feature extraction and pattern recognition, to human-like signal and image processing, to decision making.

"Interfaces", the third part of the book deals with aspects related to intelligent interfaces. In "Neuro-fuzzy approach to natural language understanding and processing" - chapters 8 (part I) and 9 (part II), a generic, dynamically-configurable neuro-fuzzy device (NFD), having interactive communication capabilities, with an environment dependent evolution and behavior, is designed. New algorithms of progressive learning are presented. In chapter 10" Graph matching and similarity" the focus is on the fundamental aspects of graph manipulation in view of increasing the intelligence of graphical interfaces.

The fourth section of the volume "Applications and High-tech Management" comprises interesting, well developed "Diagnosis systems and strategies" (chapter 11), "intelligent non-destructive testing and evaluation" methods - industrial applications (chapter 12), in uncertainty, fuzzy and neural approaches. Finally, the last two chapters "Managing high-tech projects", part I and II, emphasize the importance of an integrative perspective on intelligent systems playing an essential part in the success of such projects.

The volume also contains an index of terms, which facilitate a very quick and direct access to new technical, domain-specific, terms. Extensive references are included, offering the reader a perspective on the currently existing literature and trends.

The contributors joint together in this volume to offer a valuable systematic overview of the "Intelligent interfaces and systems" domain and a deep practical knowledge in building and using these intelligent tools in a very wide range of applications. This book is conceived to be an important reference on intelligent systems for a large audience and is highly recommended for graduate and postgraduate students, engineers from high-tech industries and researchers, teachers - to be used as supplementary readings in graduate and post-graduate courses.

Costin Mihaela, scientific researcher, Computer Science Institute, Romanian Academy, Associated professor AI discipline, Automatics and Computer Science University, Technical University, Gh. Asachi, Iasi, Romania.

I'm some interesting in fuzzy contro