This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th Dortmund Fuzzy Days, held in Dortmund, Germany, 2004. The Fuzzy-Days conference has established itself as an international forum for the discussion of new results in the field of Computational Intelligence. All the papers had to undergo a thorough review guaranteeing a solid quality of the programme. The papers are devoted to foundational and practical issues in fuzzy systems, neural networks, evolutionary algorithms, and machine learning and thus cover the whole range of computational intelligence.

Zusammenfassung
For the 8th time since 1991 we invite researchers to participate in the Do- mund Fuzzy-Days. I am very glad that our conference has established itself as an international forum for the discussion of new results in the ?eld of Com- tational Intelligence. Again all papers had to undergo a thorough review: each one was judged by ?ve referees to guarantee a solid quality of the programme. From the beginning of the Fuzzy-Days on, Lot? A. Zadeh felt associated withtheconference.Iwouldliketoexpressmygratitudeforhisencouragement and support and I am particularly glad that he once again delivers a keynote speech. Much to my pleasure Janusz Kacprzyk, Jong-Hwan Kim, Enrique Trillas and Eyke Hullermey ¨ er have also agreed to present new results of their work as keynote speakers. With Prof. Jong-Hwan Kim of the KoreanAdvanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) a colleague takes part in this years Fuzzy-Days to whom I am indebted because he has inspired me and my colleagues to turn our attention towards the exciting ?eld of Robot Soccer. Within a few years Robot Soccer has become an accepted test ?eld for robotic research and the development of Multi Agent Systems. The importance of Computational Intelligence for these applications is evident. We address this topic not only with a dedicated session, but we will also organise a robot soccer match to demonstrate to the participants the entertaining quality of robot soccer as well as the challenging scienti?c problems.

Inhalt
Plenary Talk.- Evolutionary Algorithms.- Rule-Based Fuzzy Inference.- Invited Session: Data Characterization through Fuzzy Clustering.- Plenary Talk.- Fuzzy Control.- Invited Session: Recent Advances in Theoretical Soft Computing.- Invited Session: Towards Intelligent Decision Support Systems via Soft Computing.- Fuzzy Logic in Decision Support.- Plenary Talk.- Applications of Fuzzy Systems.- Invited Session: Aggregation Operators.- Invited Session: Intelligent Techniques for Knowledge Extraction and Management.- Plenary Talk.- Fuzzy Image Processing.- Plenary Talk.- Invited Session: Evolutionary Algorithms.- Connectives.- Neural Networks.- Neuro-Fuzzy Systems.- Fuzzy Mathematics.- Fuzzy Optimization.- Poster Contributions.