 |
EECS professor reflects on his "fuzzy logic" legacy
 |
Lotfi Zadeh, known worldwide as the “father of fuzzy logic,” thoroughly enjoyed last November’s proceedings honoring him and his pioneering theory. The three-day conference included an exhaustive scientific program presented by the international elite of fuzzy logic and a full calendar of sold-out social events.
PEG SKORPINSKI PHOTO
|
The Soda Hall office of EECS professor Lotfi Zadeh has so many books and papers stacked floor to ceiling that only a small footpath remains. The documents represent a lifetime of work that began before the age of computers and continues to proffer new theories about them today.
At the center of it all is fuzzy logic, a theory that challenges classical logic’s belief in absolute true or false. Although initially met with disdain, fuzzy logic is widely accepted today, with applications for everything from consumer products, industrial systems and operations research to medicine, geology and physics.
Zadeh and his pioneering theory were the center of attention last November when the EECS department dedicated its 2005 BISC (Berkeley Initiative in Soft Computing) conference to fuzzy logic’s 40th anniversary.
A native of Soviet Azerbaijan, Zadeh studied electrical engineering, took advanced degrees at MIT and Columbia and, prior to publishing his first paper on fuzzy sets in 1965, had already made seminal contributions to systems analysis and information systems.
“I’ve always been an admirer of mathematics, but I began to see a gap between the precision of math and the imprecision of the real world,” Zadeh says. “In fuzzy logic, everything is—or is allowed to be—a matter of degree,” he explains. “This is the way human thinking is organized. In the real world, almost nothing is black and white.” He wanted computers, too, to run on gradations rather than on binary absolutes.
Zadeh came to Berkeley in 1959, recruited from a full professorship at Columbia. He was chair of electrical engineering from 1963 to 1968, at what would become a pivotal moment in the department’s history. When, in 1965, the director of the campus computer science center made a power grab for some electrical engineering faculty, Zadeh went to war. He initiated the department’s name change to EECS, not only preserving electrical engineering but also elevating the role of computer science. It set a trend that universities worldwide would soon follow.
“In general, you gain strength when you unite and lose strength when you disunite,” Zadeh says. “The Soviet Union and Europe are good examples of that.”
Now 84, Zadeh is also professor in the Graduate School and BISC director. He spends much of his time lecturing and coming up with new theories, like his fuzzy logic–based approach to computation with information described in natural language. Among many honors, he was recently named a 2006 inductee into the Silicon Valley Hall of Fame.
|
|
FOREFRONT takes you into the
labs, classrooms, and lives of professors, students, and alumni
for an intimate look at the innovative research, teaching, and
campus life that define the College of Engineering at the University
of California, Berkeley.
Published twice a year by the College of Engineering Office of Marketing & Communications. Have a comment about Forefront? E-mail
your letter to the editor. Click here
to learn more about the magazine. |
|
