Engineering problems are inherently imprecision tolerant. Biologically inspired soft computing methods are emerging as ideal tools for constructing intelligent engineering systems which employ approximate reasoning and exhibit imprecision tolerance. They also offer built-in mechanisms for dealing with uncertainty. The fundamental issues associated with engineering applications of the emerging soft computing methods are discussed, with emphasis on neural networks. A formalism for neural network representation is presented and recent developments on adaptive modeling of neural networks, specifically nested adaptive neural networks for constitutive modeling are discussed.