Professor Lotfi A. Zadeh  

www.cs.berkeley.edu/~zadeh

Fuzzy sets, Information  and Control  8,  1965.   P338, P339, P340, P341, P342, P343, P344, P345, P346, P347, P348, P349, P350, P351, P352, P353.

LOTFI A. ZADEH is a Professor in the Graduate School , Computer Science Division, Department of EECS, University of California , Berkeley . In addition, he is serving as the Director of BISC (Berkeley Initiative in Soft Computing).

Lotfi Zadeh is an alumnus of the University of Teheran , MIT and Columbia University . He held visiting appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ; MIT; IBM Research Laboratory, San Jose, CA; SRI International, Menlo Park, CA; and the Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University. His earlier work was concerned in the main with systems analysis, decision analysis and information systems. His current research is focused on fuzzy logic, computing with words and soft computing, which is a coalition of fuzzy logic, neurocomputing, evolutionary computing, probabilistic computing and parts of machine learning. The guiding principle of soft computing is that, in general, better solutions can be obtained by employing the constituent methodologies of soft computing in combination rather than in stand-alone mode.

Lotfi Zadeh is a Fellow of the IEEE, AAAS, ACM, AAAI, and IFSA. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences. He is a recipient of the IEEE Education Medal, the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal, the IEEE Medal of Honor, the ASME Rufus Oldenburger Medal, the B. Bolzano Medal of the Czech Academy of Sciences, the Kampe de Feriet Medal, the AACC Richard E. Bellman Central Heritage Award, the Grigore Moisil Prize, the Honda Prize, the Okawa Prize, the AIM Information Science Award, the IEEE-SMC J. P. Wohl Career Acheivement Award, the SOFT Scietific Contribution Memorial Award of the Japan Society for Fuzzy Theory, the IEEE Millennium Medal, the ACM 2000 Allen Newell Award, and other awards and honorary doctorates. He has published extensively on a wide variety of subjects relating to the conception, design and analysis of information/intelligent systems, and is serving on the editorial boards of over fifty journals.

Summary of principal contributions

  1. Development of a frequency-domain based theory of time-varying networks, 1949.
  2. Extension of Wiener's theory of prediction, with J.R. Ragazzini, 1950.
  3. Development of the z-transform approach, with J.R. Ragazzini, 1952.
  4. Development of a theory of nonlinear filters, 1953.
  5. Formulation of the problem of system identification, 1956.
  6. Initiation of the state-space approach to the analysis of linear systems, with C.A. Desoer, 1963.
  7. Initiation of the theory of fuzzy sets, 1965.
  8. Development of a theory of decision-making in a fuzzy environment, with R.E. Bellman, 1970.
  9. Introduction of the concepts of a linguistic variable and fuzzy if-then rules, 1973. This work laid the foundation for fuzzy logic control and most of the current applications of fuzzy logic.
  10. Development of possibility theory, 1978.
  11. Development of PRUF - a meaning representation language for natural languages, 1978.
  12. Development of a theory of approximate reasoning, 1979.
  13. Development of a theory of ususality and commonsense reasoning, 1985.
  14. Development of test-score semantics for natural languages, 1986.
  15. Development of the concept of a generalized constraint, 1986.
  16. Development of dispositional logic, 1988.
  17. Initiation of the calculii of fuzzy rules, fuzzy graphs and fuzzy probabilities, 1991.
  18. Development of Soft Computing, 1991.
  19. Development of Computing with Words, 1996.
  20. Development of a theory of fuzzy information granulation, 1997.
  21. Development of a Computational Theory of Perceptions, 1998.
  22. Development of Precisiated Natural Language, 2000.
  23. Development of a perception-based theory of probabilistic reasoning, 2001.
  24. Development of the concept of generalized definability, 2001.