Rem tene, verba sequentur (Gaius J. Victor, Rome VI century b.c.)
The ultimate goal of this book is to bring the fundamental issues of
information granularity, inference tools and problem solving procedures
into a coherent, unified, and fully operational framework. The objective
is to offer the reader a comprehensive, self-contained, and uniform
exposure to the subject.The strategy is to isolate some fundamental
bricks of Computational Intelligence in terms of key problems and
methods, and discuss their implementation and underlying rationale
within a well structured and rigorous conceptual framework as well as
carefully related to various application facets. The main assumption is
that a deep understanding of the key problems will allow the reader to
compose into a meaningful mosaic the puzzle pieces represented by the
immense varieties of approaches present in the literature and in the
computational practice. All in all, the main approach advocated in the
monograph consists of a sequence of steps offering solid conceptual
fundamentals, presenting a carefully selected collection of design
methodologies, discussing a wealth of development guidelines, and
exemplifying them with a pertinent, accurately selected illustrative
material.