Luis Magdalena – författare

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4thInternational Conference on Theory and Practice of Natural Computing, TPNC2015, held in Mieres, Spain, in December 2015.

Fuzzy modeling has become one of the most productive and successful results of fuzzy logic. Among others, it has been applied to knowledge discovery, automatic classification, long-term prediction, or medical and engineering analysis. The research developed in the topic during the last two decades has been mainly focused on exploiting the fuzzy model flexibility to obtain the highest accuracy. This approach usually sets aside the interpretability of the obtained models. However, we should remember the initial philosophy of fuzzy sets theory directed to serve the bridge between the human understanding and the machine processing. In this challenge, the ability of fuzzy models to express the behavior of the real system in a comprehensible manner acquires a great importance. This book collects the works of a group of experts in the field that advocate the interpretability improvements as a mechanism to obtain well balanced fuzzy models.

Fuzzy modeling usually comes with two contradictory requirements: interpretability, which is the capability to express the real system behavior in a comprehensible way, and accuracy, which is the capability to faithfully represent the real system. In this framework, one of the most important areas is linguistic fuzzy modeling, where the legibility of the obtained model is the main objective. This task is usually developed by means of linguistic (Mamdani) fuzzy rule-based systems. An active research area is oriented towards the use of new techniques and structures to extend the classical, rigid linguistic fuzzy modeling with the main aim of increasing its precision degree. Traditionally, this accuracy improvement has been carried out without considering the corresponding interpretability loss. Currently, new trends have been proposed trying to preserve the linguistic fuzzy model description power during the optimization process. Written by leading experts in the field, this volume collects some representative researcher that pursue this approach.

The unexpected and premature passing away of Professor Ebrahim H. "Abe" Mamdani on January, 22, 2010, was a big shock to the scientific community, to all his friends and colleagues around the world, and to his close relatives. Professor Mamdani was a remarkable figure in the academic world, as he contributed to so many areas of science and technology. Of great relevance are his latest thoughts and ideas on the study of language and its handling by computers.

The fuzzy logic community is particularly indebted to Abe Mamdani (1941-2010) who, in 1975, in his famous paper An Experiment in Linguistic Synthesis with a Fuzzy Logic Controller, jointly written with his student Sedrak Assilian, introduced the novel idea of fuzzy control. This was an elegant engineering approach to the modeling and control of complex processes for which mathematical models were unknown or too difficult to build, yet they could effectively and efficiently be controlled by human operators. This ground-breaking idea has found innumerable applications and can be considered as one of the main factors for the proliferation and adoption of fuzzy logic technology.

Professor Mamdani''s own life and vital experience are illustrative of his “never surrendering” attitude while facing adversaries, which is normal for a person proposing any novel solution, and represent a great example for everybody. His subtle sense of humor, his joy for life, and his will to critically help people, especially young people, were characteristics deeply appreciated by all the people who enjoyed and benefited from his friendship and advice.

This book constitutes a posthumous homage to Abe Mamdani. It is a collection of original papers related in some way to his works, ideas and vision, and especially written by researchers directly acquainted with him or with his work. The underlying goal of this book will be fulfilled if, in the very spirit of Mamdani''s legacy, the papers will trigger ascientific or philosophical debate on the issues covered, or contribute to a cross-fertilization of ideas in the various fields.