Human centricity and information granularity in the agenda of theories and applications of soft computing

Soft computing is an interdisciplinary area that focuses on the design of intelligent systems to process uncertain, imprecise and incomplete information. It mainly builds on fuzzy sets theory, fuzzy logic, neural computing, optimization, evolutionary algorithms, and approximate reasoning et al. Information granularity is in general regarded as a crucial design asset, which helps establish a better rapport of the resulting granular model with the system under modeling. Human centricity is an inherent property of people's view on a system, a process, a machine or a model. Information granularity can be used to reflect people's level of uncertainty and this makes its pivotal role in soft computing. Indeed, the concept of information granularity facilitates the development of theory and application of soft computing immensely. A number of papers pertaining to some recent advances in theoretical development and practical application of information granularity in soft computing are highlighted in this special issue. The main objective of this study is to collect as many as possible researches on human centricity and information granularity in the agenda of theories and applications of soft computing, review the main idea of these literatures, compare the advantages and disadvantages of their methods and try to find the relationships and relevance of these theories and applications. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.