This book and its sister volume, LNAI 3613 and 3614, constitute the proce- ings of the Second International Conference on Fuzzy Systems and Knowledge Discovery (FSKD 2005), jointly held with the First International Conference on Natural Computation (ICNC 2005, LNCS 3610, 3611, and 3612) from - gust 27-29, 2005 in Changsha, Hunan, China. FSKD 2005 successfully attracted 1249 submissions from 32 countries/regions (the joint ICNC-FSKD 2005 received 3136 submissions). After rigorous reviews, 333 high-quality papers, i. e. , 206 long papers and 127 short papers, were included in the FSKD 2005 proceedings, r- resenting an acceptance rate of 26. 7%. The ICNC-FSKD 2005 conference featured the most up-to-date research - sults in computational algorithms inspired from nature, including biological, e- logical, and physical systems. It is an exciting and emerging interdisciplinary area in which a wide range of techniques and methods are being studied for dealing with large, complex, and dynamic problems. The joint conferences also promoted cross-fertilization over these exciting and yet closely-related areas, which had a signi?cant impact on the advancement of these important technologies. Speci?c areas included computation with words, fuzzy computation, granular com- tation, neural computation, quantum computation, evolutionary computation, DNA computation, chemical computation, information processing in cells and tissues, molecular computation, arti?cial life, swarm intelligence, ants colony, arti?cial immune systems, etc. , with innovative applications to knowledge d- covery, ?nance, operations research, and more.
