When you talk about "Information processing" what actually do you have in mind?

"Information Processing" is a recently launched buzzword whose meaning is vague and obscure even for the majority of its users. The reason for this is the lack of a suitable definition for the term "information". In my attempt to amend this bizarre situation, I have realized that, following the insights of Kolmogorov's Complexity theory, information can be defined as a description of structures observable in a given data set. Two types of structures could be easily distinguished in every data set - in this regard, two types of information (information descriptions) should be designated: physical information and semantic information. Kolmogorov's theory also posits that the information descriptions should be provided as a linguistic text structure. This inevitably leads us to an assertion that information processing has to be seen as a kind of text processing. The idea is not new - inspired by the observation that human information processing is deeply rooted in natural language handling customs, Lotfi Zadeh and his followers have introduced the so-called "Computing With Words" paradigm. Despite of promotional efforts, the idea is not taking off yet. The reason - a lack of a coherent understanding of what should be called "information", and, as a result, misleading research roadmaps and objectives. I hope my humble attempt to clarify these issues would be helpful in avoiding common traps and pitfalls

Cognitive image processing: the time is right to recognize that the world does not rest more on turtles and elephants

Traditional image processing is a field of science and technology developed to facilitate human-centered image management. But today, when huge volumes of visual data inundate our surroundings (due to the explosive growth of image-capturing devices, proliferation of Internet communication means and video sharing services over the World Wide Web), human-centered handling of Big-data flows is impossible anymore. Therefore, it has to be replaced with a machine (computer) supported counterpart. Of course, such an artificial counterpart must be equipped with some cognitive abilities, usually characteristic for a human being. Indeed, in the past decade, a new computer design trend - Cognitive Computer development - is become visible. Cognitive image processing definitely will be one of its main duties. It must be specially mentioned that this trend is a particular case of a much more general movement - the transition from a "computational data-processing paradigm" to a "cognitive information-processing paradigm", which affects today many fields of science, technology, and engineering. This transition is a blessed novelty, but its success is hampered by the lack of a clear delimitation between the notion of data and the notion of information. Elaborating the case of cognitive image processing, the paper intends to clarify these important research issues