As the famous slogan ''Connecting People'' indicates, a lot of the developments in novel technologies intensify the relationship between people without necessarily enhancing technologies that are close to the nature of human beings. Examples can be easily found in recent computing paradigms, such as Cloud Computing that advances network infrastructure for data storage and resource sharing, or the Internet of Things that investigates the intelligence and awareness of objects involved in the network. From this point of view, the existing state-of-the-art solutions, in realms of artificial intelligence and/or computational intelligence, significantly differ from the human competence level in many research domains. Even though it is generally not clear whether human-like approach would show its upper-hand over existing methods, the exploration of this research path seems to be advantageous and challenging. Human-like intelligence is arguably one of the most powerful approaches for the optimization and design of complex Web, as well as its correlated issues so as to meet the requirements and growing needs of new challenging applications (and services as well). Although the state of the art behind the computational intelligence has already reached an impressive scale, there remain quite a lot of attractive research topics, with consideration of human-like or human-oriented factors, for further and promising developments.The submitted manuscripts were reviewed by experts from both academia and industry. After two rounds of reviewing, the highest quality manuscripts were accepted for this special issue. This special issue will be published by Neural Computing and Applications as special issues.