The current issue contains 12 papers presented at the <I>IEEE 9th International Conference on Intelligent Engineering Systems (INES 2005), Cruising on the Mediterranean Sea</I>, on September 16-19, 2005, and <I>3rd Serbian-Hungarian Joint Symposium on Intelligent Systems (SISY 2005), in Subotica, Serbia and Montenegro</I>, on August 31-September 1, 2005. The topics of the two conferences are very close to each other and regard Intelligent Systems both from practical and theoretical point of view. These successful conferences brought together active participants and joined researchers from several countries working on this very quickly developing, more and more important field. After a preliminary selection made by the section chairs and the International Program Committees, we have selected 12 papers to be published in extended form in the current Special Issue of the <I>Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics</I>. We would like to express our thanks to our sponsors, the organizers and mainly to the participants, who made these scientific events possible. Also, we express our thanks to the Editors of the Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics, for publishing this Special Issue. In the following we briefly describe each paper. A. Almeida, G. Marreiros present a model to support collaborative scheduling in complex dynamic manufacturing environments. This model considers the interaction between an Agent based Scheduling Module and a Group Decision Support Module. P. Baranyi, Z. Petres, P. L. Várkonyi, P. Korondi and Y. Yam study in their paper how the Tensor Product model transformation is capable of determining different types of convex hulls of the Linear Time Invariant models. The study is conducted through the example of the prototypical aeroelastic wing section. B. Bede, H. Nobuhara, J. Fodor and K. Hirota propose the study of the problem if usual sum and product can be substituted by max and product operations in defining approximation operators. In this sense max-product Shepard approximation operators are defined and studied. B. Benyó, P. Somogyi and B. Paláncz address the problem of classification of cerebral blood flow signals in order to identify the disorders of the cerebral circulation. The experimental results provided in the paper confirm the effectiveness of the proposed methods. J. Gáti and Gy. Kártyás propose a model based distance learning in the every day higher education practice in their contribution. They survey some important issues and methodological elements of virtual classrooms in comparison with demands for teaching procedures, programs, and materials. L. Horváth and I. J. Rudas propose a methodology for intelligent communication and change management for engineering modeling. This study motivated by increasing of importance of change management because of continuous product development. M. Maleković and M. Čubrilo describe in their contribution how to incorporate infatuation in multi-agent systems. Infatuation stands for the focusing on a single attractive or desirable characteristic of another agent and then considering the total agent as that one positive characteristic. E. Pap and M. Takács study two dimensional copulas as binary aggregation operators in their paper. Invariant copulas and an application of copulas in the theory of aggregation operators are discussed and a result on approximation of associative copulas by strict and nilpotent triangular norms is obtained. B. Reskó, Á. Csapó and P. Baranyi present in their contribution a visual cortex inspired cognitive model for contour and vertex detection. The contour detection and vertex extraction is performed by a vast network of simple units of computation simultaneously processing the visual data. The computational units are organized in a special structure, the Visual Feature Array. M. Takács addresses investigation of the problem of the approximate reasoning in the fuzzy systems, by reviewing a specific case, where the investigated structure is a real semi-ring with pseudo-operations. It is the investigation of special-type fuzzy sets, special g-generated t-norms and implications in approximate reasoning. J. K. Tar, I. J. Rudas and A. Rontó present in their paper a simple adaptive controller that creates only temporal and situation dependent system model. The temporal model can be built up and maintained step-by-step on the basis of slow elimination of fading information by the use of simple updating rules consisting of finite algebraic steps of lucid geometric interpretation. A. R. Várkonyi-Kóczy, A. Rövid and P. Várlaki present a new fuzzy based tone reproduction pre-processing algorithm which may help in developing the hardly or non-viewable features and content of the images making easier the further processing of it.
Guest Editorial Foreword to the Special Issue on Aggregation Operators
