Applied Systems and Cybernetics, Volume IV: Systems Research in Health Care, Biocybernetics and Ecology documents the proceedings of the International Congress on Applied Systems Research and Cybernetics. This volume compiles papers that present several concepts of health care and reflect thinking in this field. This book introduces various health care systems and models, and then tackles some issues on managing the long-term health care facility. A special information system for public health is also described in this volume. This text will be invaluable to those interested in systems research and its applications to a variety of fields, including health care.

The developments of fuzzy systems and fuzzy logic is permeating through the diverse branches of science where uncertainty has to be considered laying on the foundations and applicative developments. CIFT and MEPP conferences have been held in different venues in Scandinavia and Italy since 1990, and have stimulated the attention from academia and industry toward the novelties introduced by fuzzy logic and fuzzy systems theory. The papers presented in this volume are concerned with a wide vision of modern perspectives of science. These cover research areas such as management, financial and economic applications, urbanism and ecology, astronomical engineering, medical diagnosis and imaging, and human behavior.

Fundamentals of Fuzzy Sets covers the basic elements of fuzzy set theory. Its four-part organization provides easy referencing of recent as well as older results in the field. The first part discusses the historical emergence of fuzzy sets, and delves into fuzzy set connectives, and the representation and measurement of membership functions. The second part covers fuzzy relations, including orderings, similarity, and relational equations. The third part, devoted to uncertainty modelling, introduces possibility theory, contrasting and relating it with probabilities, and reviews information measures of specificity and fuzziness. The last part concerns fuzzy sets on the real line - computation with fuzzy intervals, metric topology of fuzzy numbers, and the calculus of fuzzy-valued functions. Each chapter is written by one or more recognized specialists and offers a tutorial introduction to the topics, together with an extensive bibliography.

Readings in Fuzzy Sets for Intelligent Systems is a collection of readings that explore the main facets of fuzzy sets and possibility theory and their use in intelligent systems. Basic notions in fuzzy set theory are discussed, along with fuzzy control and approximate reasoning. Uncertainty and informativeness, information processing, and membership, cognition, neural networks, and learning are also considered. Comprised of eight chapters, this book begins with a historical background on fuzzy sets and possibility theory, citing some forerunners who discussed ideas or formal definitions very close to the basic notions introduced by Lotfi Zadeh (1978). The reader is then introduced to fundamental concepts in fuzzy set theory, including symmetric summation and the setting of fuzzy logic; uncertainty and informativeness; and fuzzy control. Subsequent chapters deal with approximate reasoning; information processing; decision and management sciences; and membership, cognition, neural networks, and learning. Numerical methods for fuzzy clustering are described, and adaptive inference in fuzzy knowledge networks is analyzed. This monograph will be of interest to both students and practitioners in the fields of computer science, information science, applied mathematics, and artificial intelligence.

Applied Systems and Cybernetics covers the proceedings of the International Congress on Applied Systems Research and Cybernetics. The book presents several studies that cover the application of systems research and cybernetics in improving the quality of life. Majority of the materials in the text tackle various aspects of quality of life in relation to systems and cybernetics, such as living space, future prospects, work, education, politics, law, ethics and values, culture and ethnicity, and social systems. The selection also presents articles that cover the elemental properties of quality of life, such as the concept, views, indicators, and dimension. The book will be of great interest to any scientists regardless of disciplines, since it covers the main purpose of science, the improvement of quality of life.