Book excerpt: It is our great pleasure to welcome you all to the 2002 AFSS International Conference on Fuzzy Systems (AFSS 2002) to be held in Calcutta, the great City of Joy. AFSS 2002 is the ?fth conference in the series initiated by the Asian Fuzzy Systems Society (AFSS). AFSS 2002 is jointly being organized by theIndianStatisticalInstitute(ISI)andJadavpurUniversity(JU). Likeprevious conferencesinthisseries,wearesure,AFSS2002willprovideaforumforfruitful interaction and exchange of ideas between the participants from all over the globe. The present conference covers all major facets of soft computing such as fuzzy logic, neural networks, genetic algorithms including both theories and applications. Wehopethismeetingwillbeenjoyableacademicallyandotherwise. We are thankful to the members of the International Program Committee and the Area Chairs for extending their support in various forms to make a strong technical program. Each submitted paper was reviewed by at least three referees, and in some cases the revised versions were again checked by the ref- ees. As a result of this tough screening process we could select only about 50% of the submitted papers. We again express our sincere thanks to all referees for doing a great job. We are happy to note that 19 di?erent countries from all over the globe are represented by the authors, thereby making it a truly inter- tional conference. We are proud to have a list of distinguished speakers including Profs. Z. Pawlak, J. Bezdek, D. Dubois, and T. Yamakawa.