Welcome to the second special issue on selected papers from SCIS & ISIS 2008, a joint conference combining the 4th Soft Computing and Intelligent Systems (SCIS) and the 9th International Symposium on advances Intelligent Systems (ISIS) held at Nagoya University, Japan, in September 2008.

Three earlier conferences were held in: the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan (2002); Keio University, Japan (2004); and Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan (2006).

Conference topics include fuzzy logic, clustering, evolutionary computation, machine learning, rough sets, man-machine interaction/interfaces, neural networks, computer vision, image processing, cognitive modeling, computational intelligence, etc.

Papers of interest containing novel algorithms and ideas in these fields have been selected, so I hope you will enjoy this issue.

I would like to thank the many people who have produced these special issues for SCIS & ISIS2008, and all of the authors and reviewers. Without your help, this issue would not have been possible.