NAFIPS

Norbert Wiener in the 21st Century marks 50 years since Lotfi Zadeh started thinking about Fuzzy Sets. Lotfi Zadeh’s first paper after the completion of his PhD was an article on “Wiener extension” co-authored with John Ragazzini.Hence, the 2014 North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society conference (NAFIPS 2014) is held as a part of IEEE 2014 Conference on Norbert Wiener in the 21st Century in order to commemorate this occasion. NAFIPS 2014 offers an excellent opportunity for researchers in the area of fuzzy logic and soft computing to submit their contributions in one or more of the Conference Themes. Please see the Call for Papers and Instructions for Authors and Students pages for details.

The North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society (NAFIPS) is a professional organization that unites researchers in fuzzy systems area. Its main mission is to provide leadership in the modelling and management of uncertainty with an emphasis on fuzzy systems, theory and applications.

NAFIPS notes and Norbert Wiener:

The time when Wiener’s cybernetics emerged, there were two competing new directions in system design, development, and control:
• a continuous (analog) direction promoted by cybernetics, and
• a discrete (logic-based) direction promoted by first computers associated with the name of John von Neumann.

There has been a fruitful cross-pollination between these approaches, but they largely remained different – until, in 1965, Lotfi Zadeh, a specialist in systems, combined these two directions by showing that, to properly take into account human reasoning, it is not enough to use traditional discrete (two-valued) logic, we need a continuous logic. The resulting fuzzy logic has indeed led to numerous useful practical applications.