****** Special Session ******
“Applications of Fuzzy Systems to Benefit Society”

Organizers: Bernadette Bouchon-Meunier and Keeley Crockett

Aims
    The aim of this session is to emphasise the use of fuzzy systems in applications which benefit society and humanity. Over the last few years there have been significant applications in society which particularly utilise fuzzy systems in nurturing professions such as education, health care and social care as well as more human interfacing areas such as customer relationship management. These applications can make a significant difference to peoples everyday lives and provide measurable benefits.

The session follows on from a successful workshop entitled “Applications of Computational Intelligence to Benefit Society” which was held in held at the IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence in Hong Kong 2008.

Objectives and Scope
    The aim of the session is to provide a forum to disseminate and discuss recent and significant research efforts and real-world applications in Fuzzy Systems which have significantly benefited society. New, unusual and hybrid approaches used to create such applications are particularly encouraged and should clearly reflect the benefit to society. The session is therefore open to high quality submissions from researchers who should present original research and applications including innovative results. Applications include but are not limited too:
• Educational
• Medical
• Financial
• Industrial
• Customer Relationship Management
• Human Recourse Management

Such applications should utilise the following topic areas of fuzzy systems (but are not limited to):
• Genetic Fuzzy Systems including adaptive, hierarchical, evolutionary, neural and nature-inspired systems.
• Hybrid systems of computational intelligence techniques
• Fuzzy image, speech and signal processing, vision and multimedia
• Fuzzy control and robotics
• Fuzzy optimization and design, decision analysis and support
• Fuzzy data analysis - clustering and classifiers, pattern recognition, bio-informatics
• Fuzzy information processing - information extraction and retrieval, fusion, text mining
• Knowledge discovery, learning, reasoning, agents, knowledge representation
• Computing with words, fuzzy human computer interaction
• Application optimization, decision analysis, decision making, multi-criteria decision making

Full details for author submission can be found at http://www.fuzz-ieee2009.org//
Papers submitted to special sessions will go through the normal reviewing process.