From Rough Sets of Soft Computing: Introduction

By the invitation of the Conference Chair Professor Paul P. Wang, a Workshop on Rough Set Theory was held in the Second Joint Conferences on Information Sciences held at Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, September 28-October 1, 1995. The workshop in the setting of joint conferences provided a forum for rough setters to interact and to exchange their views, results and philosophies with each subconstituent of soft computing. More than 40 papers were presented at the workshop. The presented papers ranged from theories to applications, and rough sets to soft computing. This special issue is a collection of the final versions of some of the papers presented in the workshop. The collection started with three papers on in-depth applications of rough set theory. They are "Speaker-Independent Recognition of Isolated Words Using Rough Sets" by Andrzej Czyzewski, and "Computer Based Recognition of Musical Phrases Using The Rough-Set Approach" by Bozena Kostek, and "Entropy of English Text: Experiments with Humans and a Machine Learning System Based on Rough Sets" by Hamid Moradi, Jerzy W. Grzymala-Busse, and James A. Roberts. The next three papers explore the relationships between rough sets and soft computing. They are "Fuzzy Sets and BinaryProximity-Based Rough Sets" by Tetsuya Murai, Hideo Kanemitsu, and Masaru Shimbo, "Rough Mereological Foundations for Design, Analysis, Synthesis, and Control in Distributed Systems" by Andrzej Skowron and Lech Polkowski, and "Interpretations of Belief Functions in the Theory of Rough Sets" by Y. Y. Yao and P. J. Lingras. The collection concludes with a soft computing paper, "Model-based Neural Algorithms for Parameter Estimation" by Fredrik P. Skantze and Anuradha M. Annaswamy. A few more papers that should have been in this issue are in Paul Wang's book, Advances in Machine Intelligence and Soft Computing Volume IV. "Neighborhood Systems--A Qualitative Theory for Fuzzy and Rough Sets" by T. Y. Lin, and "Similarity Relations as a Basis for Rough Approximation"