Special issue on ICONIP 2012

As one of the top conferences on intelligent computation, the 19th International Conference on Neural Information Processing (ICONIP 2012) was successfully held in Doha, Qatar, from November 11th to 15th, 2012, and covered wide topics on researches and applications of neural network in various fields. To continue such success, a special issue is launched on ‘‘Computational intelligence methods and Applications,’’ with 19 high-quality papers selected from ICONIP 2012 in Neural Computing and Applications. The purpose of this special issue is to track the latest process of researches and applications of neural networks, computational intelligence methods, and others. It is well known that computational intelligence as a hot focal will promote the development of society in the fields of neural computation, fuzzy computation, evolution computation, and so on. Therefore, it is meaningful to investigate the new theory, methodology, and tools for the computational intelligence study. To this end, the 19 selected papers in this special issue can be categorized into three major sections under this theme. The first section is focused on computational intelligence methods and applications in finance. Q.F. Meng et al. propose a multi-agent model to observe the impact of small-world network characteristics on incentive effects. They design two experiment scenarios to study the impact of the probability of replacement objects and the number of comparison objects on incentive effects. Experimental results show that under the impact of inequity aversion psychological, greater probability of replacement comparison objects will induce to lower profit and product sales volume of the manufacturer. D.H. Zhang et al. propose a supply disruption emergency management model of supply chain in the perspective of risk management. They also discuss whether the decision-making mechanism of the case-based reasoning can bring better effect for supply disruption based on numerical experiment, and a conclusion is reached that based on case-based reasoning, the emergency management mechanism can provide better management of the supply emergency disruption. Utilizing 157 samples of Chinese college-graduate village official, L. Xiao and M. Fan conduct an empirical study and find out that the social network may not always promote entrepreneurial intention. S.P. Cheng et al. propose an estimation of distribution algorithm to solve the NP-hard problem in service selection and present a web service selection method based on the Univariate Marginal Distribution Algorithm (UMDA). Global service selection problem is modeled as an optimization problem. The characteristics of global service selection problem are not considered while adopting the basic UMDA algorithm to solve the problem. The second section is focused on neural dynamics and dynamic systems. H. Wang et al. analyze the dynamical characteristics of a two-dimensional simplified H–H model exposed to external electric fields. The necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of the Hopf bifurcation is Z. Zeng Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China