Anastasios N. Venetsanopoulos

Nicolaos Karayiannis

1.1 Overview We are living in a decade recently declared as the "Decade of the Brain". Neuroscientists may soon manage to work out a functional map of the brain, thanks to technologies that open windows on the mind. With the average human brain consisting of 15 billion neurons, roughly equal to the number of stars in our milky way, each receiving signals through as many as 10,000 synapses, it is quite a view. "The brain is the last and greatest biological frontier", says James Weston codiscoverer of DNA, considered to be the most complex piece of biological machinery on earth. After many years of research by neuroanatomists and neurophys iologists, the overall organization of the brain is well understood, but many of its detailed neural mechanisms remain to be decoded. In order to understand the functioning of the brain, neurobiologists have taken a bottom-up approach of studying the stimulus-response characteristics of single neurons and networks of neurons, while psy chologists have taken a top-down approach of studying brain func tions from the cognitive and behavioral level. While these two ap proaches are gradually converging, it is generally accepted that it may take another fifty years before we achieve a solid microscopic, intermediate, and macroscopic understanding of brain.

Learning Algorithms, Performance Evaluation, and Applications

Artificial Neural Networks

S.G. Tzafestas

Great progresses have been made in the application of fuzzy set theory and fuzzy logic. Most remarkable area of application is 'fuzzy control', where fuzzy logic was first applied to plant control systems and its use is expanding to consumer products. Most of fuzzy control systems uses fuzzy inference with max-min or max-product composition, similar to the algorithm that first used by Mamdani in 1970s. Some algorithms are developed to refine fuzzy controls systems but the main part of algorithm stays the same. Triggered by the success of fuzzy control systems, other ways of applying fuzzy set theory are also investigated. They are usually referred to as 'fuzzy expert sys tems', and their purpose are to combine the idea of fuzzy theory with AI based approach toward knowledge processing. These approaches can be more generally viewed as 'fuzzy information processing', that is to bring fuzzy idea into informa tion processing systems.

Anastasios N. Venetsanopoulos

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