Soft-Ware 2002: Computing in an Imperfect World

This was the ?rst conference of a new series devoted to the e?ective handling of soft issues in the design, development, and operation of computing systems. The conference brought together contributors from a range of relevant disciplines, including arti?cial intelligence, information systems, software engineering, and systems engineering. The keynote speakers, Piero Bonissone, Ray Paul, Sir Tony Hoare, Michael Jackson, and Derek McAuley have interests and experience that collectively span all of these ?elds. Soft issues involve information or knowledge that is uncertain, incomplete, or contradictory. Examples of where such issues arise include: requirements management and software quality control in software engine- ing, con?ict or multiple sources information management in information systems, decision making/prediction in business management systems, quality control in networks and user services in telecommunications, traditional human rationality modeling in arti?cial intelligence, data analysis in machine learning and data mining, control management in engineering. The concept of dealing with uncertainty became prominent in the arti?cial intel- gence community nearly 20 years ago, when researchers realized that addressing uncertainty was an essential part of representing and reasoning about human knowledge in intelligent systems. The main methodologies that have emerged in this area are soft computing and computational intelligence.