Book excerpt: This book contains accepted papers presented at SOCO 2022 conference held in the beautiful and historic city of Salamanca (Spain), in September 2022. Soft computing represents a collection or set of computational techniques in machine learning, computer science, and some engineering disciplines, which investigate, simulate, and analyze very complex issues and phenomena. After a thorough peer-review process, the 17th SOCO 2022 International Program Committee selected 64 papers which are published in these conference proceedings and represent an acceptance rate of 60%. In this relevant edition, a particular emphasis was put on the organization of special sessions. Seven special sessions were organized related to relevant topics such as machine learning and computer vision in Industry 4.0; time series forecasting in industrial and environmental applications; optimization, modeling, and control by soft computing techniques; soft computing applied to renewable energy systems; preprocessing big data in machine learning; tackling real-world problems with artificial intelligence. The selection of papers was extremely rigorous to maintain the high quality of the conference. We want to thank the members of the program committees for their hard work during the reviewing process. This is a crucial process for creating a high-standard conference; the SOCO conference would not exist without their help.