Greetings from NAFIPS 2016 organizing committee chairs

The Organizing Committee of NAFIPS’2016 welcomes you to El Paso, Texas. We hope that you will enjoy both the scientific part of the conference – an exciting exchange of ideas related to fuzzy logic and soft computing – and the beauty of our Southwestern border city of El Paso. This conference would not be possible without hard work of many people all over the world. We are very thankful to all of these people. We want to thank the plenary speakers: • Ildar Batyrshin, Centro de Investigación en Computación, Instituto Politechnico Nacional, Mexico City, Mexico • Piero Bonissone, Piero P. Bonissone Analytics, LLC, CEO, USA • Samir Abou-Samra, DigiPen Institute of Technology, USA • Martine De Cock, Institute of Technology of the University of Washington Tacoma, USA & Ghent University, Belgium • Christian Servin, El Paso Community College, El Paso, Texas, USA • Dongrui Wu, DataNova LLC, USA for taking the time to come and present their fascinating research results. We want to thank organizers of special sessions – some of which are, in fact, mini-conferences – who helped organize these focused parts of our meeting. The special sessions this year are as follows: • Computational Intelligence in Biomedical Applications, organized by Phuong Nguyen; • Computing with Words and Beyond, organized by Victor Raskin and Julia Taylor; • Fuzzy Logic Applications in Construction Engineering and Management, organized by Aminah Robinson Fayek and Chrysostomos Stylios; • Fuzzy Pattern Recognition with High Uncertainty, organized by Mohammad H. Fazel Zarandi, I. Burhan Turksen, Behshad Lahijanian; • High Level Fuzzy Social Networks and Social Media, organized by Susan Bastani, Mohammad H. Fazel Zarandi, I. Burhan Turksen, and Mansoureh Naderipour; and • Inter-relation between interval and fuzzy techniques, organized by Martine Ceberio and Vladik Kreinovich. We want to thank all the authors who contributed their interesting papers on various applications of fuzzy techniques and on various theoretical aspects of these techniques. We want to thank the chair of the program committee, Hung T. Nguyen, and the members of the program committee, as well as the many anonymous referees who helped the authors improve the clarity of their results. We also want to thank our sponsors: NAFIPS, IEEE, and the University of Texas at El Paso. We want to thank NAFIPS Board of Directors for their active help. We are especially thankful to NAFIPS President William Melek. We want to thank the University of Texas at El Paso staff, especially Ms. Alexandra Garcia and Ms. Lourdes Chee, for their continuous support with conference logistics. And, last but not the least, we want to thank the students. The students are our future. We want to thank the students who submitted their papers, the students who came to listen and learn, and especially the student helpers Cristian Ayub, Phillip Hassoun, Miguel Zamudio for their hard work; many thanks to Angel Garcia and Leobardo Valera: they were essential in putting the proceedings together. Thanks to all of you!