The constant growth of the Internet and the introduction of concepts such as the Semantic Web and Linked Data create challenges as well as opportunities to transform the web into an environment providing the users with the abilities to utilize and explore it in a different “human-like” and efficient way. The Internet is a huge collection of services, documents and data that are inherently heterogeneous, imprecise, uncertain, incomplete and even inconsistent. Moreover, searching data is not the same as obtaining information. Indeed, the web users have often difficulty to search the web, analyze obtained data and extract information. Hence, there is a need for intelligent systems supporting the users in their webrelated activities. Computational intelligence can provide important and non-trivial approaches, techniques and methods ensuring a human-like way of dealing with imprecision, fusing information from multiple sources, selecting best among multiple alternatives, extracting knowledge and managing massive data. It is anticipated, that applications of fuzziness, learning and evolutionary approaches to web systems will bring a new and human friendly way of interacting with the web and an efficient tool to extract useful information. This special session will focus on the current research trends in the area of theory and practical aspects of intelligent systems equipped with fuzzy and other computational intelligence methods suitable for solving issues specific to web utilization, as well as the representation and processing of information and knowledge.

Organisers:

• Marek Reformat, University of Alberta, Canada, marek.reformat@ualberta.ca
• Chang-Shing Lee, National University of Tainan, Taiwan, changshing.lee@gmail.com
• Giovanni Acampora, University of Naples Federico II, Italy, giovanni.acampora@unina.it
• Amir Pourabdollah, Nottingham Trent University, United Kingdom, amir.pourabdollah@ntu.ac.uk
• Autilia Vitiello, University of Naples Federico II, Italy, autilia.vitiello@unina.it (corresponding organizer)

Biographies

Marek Reformat received his M.Sc. degree (with honors) from Technical University of Poznan, Poland, and his Ph.D. from University of Manitoba, Canada. Presently, he is a professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta. The goal of his research activities is to develop methods and techniques for intelligent data modelling and analysis leading to translation of data into knowledge, as well as to design systems that possess abilities to imitate different aspects of human behavior. He recognizes the concepts of Computational Intelligence with fuzzy computing and possibility theory in particular are key elements necessary for capturing relationships between pieces of data and knowledge, and for mimicking human ways of reasoning about opinions and facts. Dr. Reformat applies elements of fuzzy sets to social networks, Linked Open Data, and Semantic Web in order to handle inherently imprecise information, and provide users with unique facts retrieved from the data. He has been a member of program committees of multiple international conferences related to Computational Intelligence and Software Engineering. Currently, he is a chair of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Task Force: Fuzzy Systems for Web Intelligence (www.fuzzywebintelligence.org).

Chang-Shing Lee received the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Information Engineering from the National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan, in 1998. Currently, he is a Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National University of Tainan (NUTN), Tainan, Taiwan. His major research interests are in Ontology Applications, Knowledge Management, Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), Semantic Web, and Artificial Intelligence. He is also interested in Intelligent Agent, Web Services, Fuzzy Theory & Application, Machine Learning, and Item Response Theory. He also holds several patents on Ontology Engineering, Document Classification, Image Filtering, and Healthcare. Dr. Lee was the ETTC Chair of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) in 2009-2010 and the ETTC Vice-Chair of the IEEE CIS in 2008. Additionally, he is the Committee Member of the IEEE CIS International Task Force on Intelligent Agents and the member of the IEEE SMC Technical Committee on Intelligent Internet System (TCIIS). He also serves as an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games (IEEE TCIAIG) and International Journal of Fuzzy Systems (IJFS), Journal of Ambient Intelligence & Humanized Computing. Moreover, he also serves as an Editor Board for the Applied Intelligence, The Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics (JACIII), and Soft Computing as well as a guest editor for IEEE TCIAIG, Applied Intelligence (AI), International Journal of Intelligent System (IJIS), Journal of Internet Technology (JIT), and International Journal of Fuzzy Systems (IJFS). He is also the Program Committee of more than 50 conferences. He is a Member of Taiwanese Association for Artificial Intelligence (TAAI), and Software Engineering Association Taiwan (SEAT).

Giovanni Acampora received the Laurea (cum laude) and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of Salerno, Salerno, Italy, in 2003 and 2007, respectively. Currently, he is Associate Professor in Artificial Intelligence at University of Naples Federico II, Italy. From September 2013 to September 2016, he was Reader in Computational Intelligence at the School of Science and Technology, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK. From July 2011 to August 2012, he was in a Hoofddocent Tenure Track in Process intelligence at the School of Industrial Engineering, Information Systems, Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Giovanni Acampora designed and developed the fuzzy markup language, an XML-based language for modeling fuzzy systems in human-readable and hardware independent way. As a result of this activity, he got a prestigious IEEE-SA Emerging Technology Award. His main research interests include computational intelligence, fuzzy modeling, evolutionary computation, and ambient intelligence. In these topics, he has been invited to hold about ten talks in foreign universities and during international conferences. Prof. Acampora was a Secretary and Treasurer of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (IEEE CIS) Italian Chapter (2010–2012). He chaired the IEEE CIS Standards Committee (2011–2013, 2016-2017). He is the Chair of IEEE-SA 1855WG, the working group that has published the IEEE Standard 1855 (on May 2016), the first IEEE standard in the area of fuzzy logic. He serves as an Editor in Chief of Springer Quantum Machine Intelligence, Associate Editor of Springer Soft Computing and Editorial Board Member of Springer Memetic Computing, Elsevier Heliyon, Inderscience International Journal of Autonomous and Adaptive Communication Systems, and IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems. Moreover, he organized two special issues in two Springer Journals. In 2017, he acted as General Chair of IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems, the top leading conference in the area of fuzzy logic. Moreover, he organized about ten special sessions in international conferences.

Amir Pourabdollah is a senior lecturer in computer science at Nottingham Trent University. He currently teaches System Analysis and Design for UG and PG levels. He is with Computational Intelligence and Applications Research Group, and supervises PhD students in the area of Artificial Intelligence. Since 2009, Amir has been appointed as Research fellow in Data Analytics, Advanced Data Analysis Centre (University of Nottingham), Research fellow in computer science, IMA and LUCID research groups (University of Nottingham), Research fellow in geospatial science, Nottingham Geospatial Institute (University of Nottingham) and Honorary Lecturer (Liverpool University Online Programs). His research interests are Fuzzy Logic Systems, Uncertainty Decision Making, Medical Ontologies, Medical Data Management, Linked Data, Semantic Web & RDF.

Autilia Vitiello is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Physics “Ettore Pancini” of the University of Naples Federico II. She took the master’s degree cum laude in Computer Science at the University of Salerno in July 2009, defending a thesis in Time Sensitive Fuzzy Agents: formal model and implementation. From November 2009 to October 2012 she attended Ph.D. Program at Department of Computer Science of the same university. From September to December 2012, she was a visiting student at the School of Industrial Engineering, Information Systems, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. She got Ph.D. in Computer Science on April 15th, 2013, defending a thesis titled Memetic Algorithms for Ontology Alignment. She is Chair of the IEEE CIS Standards Committee and of the Task Force named Datasets for Computational Intelligence. She is part of the IEEE Standard Association 1855 Working Group for Fuzzy Markup Language Standardization where she also serves as Secretary. Her main research interests are in the field of the Computational Intelligence and Machine Learning.