Computational Intelligence in Multi-Source Data and Information Fusion

The rapid development of information technologies in the last decades of the twentieth century created opportunities to increase the effectiveness in practically every area of human activity. The use of ever more powerful computers contributed to a better understanding of the nature of many social, economic, physical and physiological phenomena. Somewhat surprising was the discovery that the increase of data collection and information processing power does not necessarily increase our ability to define cause-effect relationships and to predict the development of realworld processes. Computers helped us to discard certain paradigms and to reveal some characteristics of nonlinear behavior and complex interaction. Nevertheless, our abilities to analyze, model, and predict is still rather limited. A number of methods have been proposed that combine the power of computer processing with attempts to imitate biological processing and human intellect. A new framework recently emerged – computational intelligence (CI). The application of CI methods to the problem of fusing data and information from multiple sources has significant potential, not yet fully discovered.