Abstract: We start with a brief account of complex decision making problems, and advocate the use of modern approaches to real world decision making emphasizing the concept of a decision making process that involves more factors and aspects like: the use of explicit and tacit knowledge, intuition, individual habitual domains, non-trivial rationality, different paradigms, etc. We stress the need for computer based decision support systems that should exhibit some “intelligence” which is meant in an individual and collective perspective, and give an overview of main types of decision support systems.

We present some new so-called computing paradigms that try to attain a synergy, and bridge the gap between the human user and computer systems that is mainly caused by the fact that natural language is the only fully natural means of communication and articulation for a human being but it is “strange” to the computer. We advocate the so-called: human centric computing, human centered computing, human computing, etc. that can help bridge this gap.

Then, we present Zadeh’s paradigm of computing with words (and perceptions) as a tool that may help bring computing closer to the human being by an explicit use of (quasi)natural language in many phases of computing, problem solving, etc.

We indicate relations between the computing with words and human centric computing paradigms, and indicate – first – that the former can be viewed as an attempt at providing proper tools to implement the latter, and that both can play a crucial role in intelligent decision support systems.

We show some implementations of using linguistic data summaries in a business context and show that they can be viewed as extremely human consistent data mining tools, notably for novice users.
 

Brief biography of the speaker:
Janusz Kacprzyk is Professor of Computer Science at the Systems Research Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences, and Honorary Professor at the Department of Mathematics, Yli Normal University, Shanxi, China. He has been a visiting professor at many universities in the USA, England, Italy and Mexico. He is Academician (Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences).

His research interests include intelligent systems, soft computing, fuzzy logic, decision making, decision analysis and decision support, database querying, information retrieval, data analysis, data mining, etc.

He is President of IFSA (International Fuzzy Systems Association), and President of the Polish Society for Operational and Systems Research.

He is Fellow of IEEE and IFSA. He received The 2005 IEEE CIS Fuzzy Pioneer Award for pioneering works on multistage fuzzy control, notably fuzzy dynamic programming, and The Sixth Kaufmann Prize and Gold Medal for pioneering works on the use of fuzzy logic in economy and management.

His publication record is: 5 books, 30 volumes, 300 papers. He is Editor in chief of 3 Springer’s book series, and a co-editor of one Springer book series, is on the editorial boards of ca. 30 journals, and was a member of the IPC at more than 200 conferences.