Computational Intelligence - August 2014 - 2

CIM Editorial Board
Editor-in-Chief
Hisao Ishibuchi
Osaka Prefecture University
Graduate School of Engineering
Department of Computer Science
1-1 Gakuen-cho, Nakaku, Sakai, Osaka
599-8531, JAPAN
(Phone) +81-72-254-9350
(Fax) +81-72-254-9915
(E-mail) hisaoi@cs.osakafu-u.ac.jp

Hisao Ishibuchi
Osaka Prefecture University, JAPAN

Big Data Era

Founding Editor-in-Chief
Gary G.Yen, Oklahoma State University, USA
Past Editor-in-Chief
Kay Chen Tan, National University of
Singapore, SINGAPORE
Editors-At-Large
Piero P. Bonissone,
General Electric Global Research, USA
David B. Fogel, Natural Selection, Inc., USA
Vincenzo Piuri, University of Milan, ITALY
Marios M. Polycarpou, University of Cyprus,
CYPRUS
Jacek M. Zurada, University of Louisville, USA
Associate Editors
Hussein Abbass, University of New South
Wales, AUSTRALIA
Cesare Alippi, Politecnico di Milano, ITALY
Angelo Cangelosi, Plymouth University, UK
Oscar Cordón, University of Granada and
European Centre for Soft Computing, SPAIN
Swagatam Das, Indian Statistical Institute, INDIA
Barbara Hammer, Bielefeld University,
GERMANY
Kiyota Hashimoto, Osaka Prefecture
University, JAPAN
Yaochu Jin, University of Surrey, UK
Jong-Hwan Kim, Korea Advanced Institute of
Science and Technology, KOREA
Jane Jing Liang, Zhengzhou University, CHINA
Chun-Liang Lin, National Chung Hsing
University,TAIWAN
Yusuke Nojima, Osaka Prefecture University,
JAPAN
Yew Soon Ong, Nanyang Technological
University, SINGAPORE
Dipti Srinivasan, National University of
Singapore, SINGAPORE
Ke Tang, University of Science and Technology
of China, CHINA
Chuan-Kang Ting, National Chung Cheng
University,TAIWAN
Dongbin Zhao, Chinese Academy of Sciences,
CHINA
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Assistant Art Director, Gail A. Schnitzer
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Fran Zappulla
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Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCI.2014.2329612

Editor's
Remarks

am planning to go to Orlando to attend the IEEE SSCI
Conference in December 2014. My family will join me for the
trip. This will be our first family trip abroad in the 21st century.
We visited Orlando together once back in October 1997, when I
was attending the IEEE SMC Conference held that year. In those
days, arranging our accommodations was much simpler than it is
now. My three sons were still quite young then, so there was no
extra charge for them to stay at the hotel we selected. One room sufficed for the
entire family. Now, however, my sons are older, so we may need two or three rooms.
This makes choosing a suitable hotel very difficult on a limited travel budget.
When I choose a hotel to stay in during an international conference, I usually follow a simple routine procedure. First I check the room rate of the conference hotel
(i.e., the hotel recommended on the conference webpage). If the room rate is reasonable, I don't look any further, but if it is expensive, I check out a few hotels close to
the conference venue using the webpage of a small Japanese travel company. I choose
the hotel with the lowest room rate. I almost always follow this simple routine to
avoid spending too much time browsing the web. I have just completed my hotel
reservation for the IEEE WCCI Conference in Beijing using this method.
However, I am afraid that I will not be able to find a good hotel in Orlando for
my family using such a simple routine procedure. One problem is that their preferences are totally different from mine. For example, they do not have to stay at a hotel
close to the conference venue. Moreover, each of them may have a different preference. Another problem is that at least two rooms are needed even though the budget
for my family travel is very tight. As a result, I am tackling a difficult optimization
problem with multiple objectives under a severe budget constraint. I think that I will
learn from this a lot about the real difficulties of multi-objective optimization and
solution selection.
I tried to extract useful information from hotel booking websites to find the best
hotel for my family. When I visited one website, I found more than 300 hotels in
Orlando. First, I filtered them using a particular price range and specific hotel locations, which generated a list of about 30 candidate hotels. Next, I started to read
reviews of each hotel to manually extract useful information for my travel planning.
However, I gave up reading the reviews even before completing my examination of
the very first hotel I looked at. This is because there were more than 2000 reviews
to read. I could not reach any useful conclusions despite the fact that each review
contained a lot of potentially useful information. If each hotel had only a few
reviews, I would have been able to read all the reviews of each candidate hotel.
Then I would have chosen a hotel based on those reviews. That is, if there had been
much less data available, I would have been able to fully utilize the data in my decision making. As it was, however, I could make no good use of the data: there was
simply too much.
I may need an intelligent software agent that can quickly read thousands of
reviews automatically. Useful information will be extracted for each hotel on such
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCI.2014.2326089
Date of publication: 14 July 2014

IEEE ComputatIonal IntEllIgEnCE magazInE | august 2014

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Computational Intelligence - August 2014