With singularity in the horizon, machine intelligence is racing to outdo human intelligence in many application areas. Hardware and software architects are hard-pressed to search for unconventional functional capabilities commanded by these requirements. Traditional architectures are being proven to be insufficient in many layers of this capability stack. At this critical juncture in the computing and human history, Soft Computing is evolving as a key technology enabler across the stack. On one hand it allows machines to operate with abstract information and build novel functional faculties needed for human-like problem solving capabilities, while on the other hand it helps bridge the performance and power density gap by allowing hardware architectures to operate in imprecise and probabilistic levels.

As an emerging research field, "Computational Intelligence & Soft Computing" poses many challenges: (a) Provide human-like perception and problem solving functionality (b) Build the needed performance/power density with imprecise hardware architectures (c) Develop resilient algorithms capable of operating with noisy information and low precisions (d) provide an execution environment with proper orchestration, compiler/runtime capabilities to identify varying degrees of error tolerance of the application and optimally map them to proper hardware blocks and operating points to bound the error across stack and provide the required precision and capabilities (e) provide end-to-end system designs that combine soft computing platforms with optimal content compression and transmission over noisy stochastic channels to maximize intelligent application performance under latency and power constraints.

We hope to encourage discussions on these topics during the workshop via invited talks and selected papers from soliciting submissions from academia and industry.