ERCIM workshop on soft computing 2003

The second workshop of the ERCIM working group on soft computing was held on October 18.-20. in Brno, Czech Republic, in parallel with the DATAKON conference. Joining DATAKON was extremely helpful since the whole organization of local matters was done by DATAKON organizers, including the opening concert and wellcome reception on October 18 (arrival day). Our thanks are due to Professor Staudek from Masaryk University, the chair of DATAKON, for this possibility. Let us mention that previous three workshops on soft computing (the 2002 workshop being the first one recognized as a workshop of the ERCIM group) were held in parallel with SOFSEM conferences; the reason for a change is the fact that SOFSEM changed its date to a term being in clash with an important conference on fuzzy logic.

Our 2003 workshop had four invited talks and nine contributions; proceedings with full papers appeared as issue 5 of volume 13 of the international journal Neural Networks World. Invited talks were as follows:

• C.G. Fermüller: Theories of vagueness versus fuzzy logic: can logicians learn from philosophers ?
• B. Gerla: Many-valued logics and semirings.
• S. Jenei, F. Montagna: A proof of standard completeness for non-commutative monoidal t-norm logic.
• P. Jipsen: An overview of generalized basic logic algebras.

Contributed papers (by czech, slovak, english and italian authors) concerned various topic of probabilistic, possibilistic and fuzzy approaches to managing uncertainty.

Let me quote from my Editorial of the proceedings: "The fourth workshop on soft computing appears to continue in our good tradition and to contribute to foundational and other aspects of the discipline of soft computing. It is hoped that we shall keep ths tradition also in the future."

Petr Hájek, Prague