Rem tene, verba sequentur (Gaius J. Victor, Rome VI century b.c.)

The ultimate goal of this book is to bring the fundamental issues of information granularity, inference tools and problem solving procedures into a coherent, unified, and fully operational framework. The objective is to offer the reader a comprehensive, self-contained, and uniform exposure to the subject.The strategy is to isolate some fundamental bricks of Computational Intelligence in terms of key problems and methods, and discuss their implementation and underlying rationale within a well structured and rigorous conceptual framework as well as carefully related to various application facets. The main assumption is that a deep understanding of the key problems will allow the reader to compose into a meaningful mosaic the puzzle pieces represented by the immense varieties of approaches present in the literature and in the computational practice. All in all, the main approach advocated in the monograph consists of a sequence of steps offering solid conceptual fundamentals, presenting a carefully selected collection of design methodologies, discussing a wealth of development guidelines, and exemplifying them with a pertinent, accurately selected illustrative material.