Computer Scientists From The United States

"The first stage of the transition from the traditional view to the modem view of uncertainty began in the late 19th century, when physics became concerned with processes at the molecular level."

"In spite of the insurmountable computational limits, we continue to pursue the many problems that possess the characteristics of organized complexity. These problems are too important for our well being to give up on them. The main challenge in pursuing these problems narrows down fundamentally to one question: how to deal with systems and associated problems whose complexities are beyond our information processing limits? That is, how can we deal with these problems if no computational power alone is sufficient?"

"Probability theory is an ideal tool for formalizing uncertainty in situations where class frequencies are known or where evidence is based on outcomes of a sufficiently long series of independent random experiments. Possibility theory, on the other hand, is ideal for formalizing incomplete information expressed in terms of fuzzy propositions."

"As an indispensable constituent of AI, fuzzy logic is a superset of conventional (Boolean) logic that has been extended to handle the concept of partial truth, where the truth value can range between completely true and completely false. As the creator of a new field of mathematics—fuzzy set theory and fuzzy logic—Lotfi Zadeh’s intellectual contributions are myriad. He is also known for his research in system theory, information processing, AI, expert systems, natural language understanding, and the theory of evidence. 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 term fuzzy logic is used in this paper to describe an imprecise logical system, FL, in which the truth-values are fuzzy subsets of the unit interval with linguistic labels such as true, false, not true, very true, quite true, not very true and not very fake, etc.... As a consequence, the truth tables and the rules of inference in fuzzy logic are (i) inexact and (ii) dependent on the meaning associated with the primary truth-value true as well as the modifiers very quite."

"Conceptual graphs (CGs) (Sowa 1976; 1984) and fuzzy logic (Zadeh 1965; 1975a) are two logical formalisms that emphasize the target of natural language, each of which is focused on one of the two mentioned desired features of a logic for handling natural language. Conceptual graphs, based on semantic networks and Peirce's existential graphs, combine the visual advantage of graphical languages and the expressive power of logic."

"Systems science is a science whose domain of inquiry consists of those properties of systems and associated problems that emanate from the general notion of systemhood."

"In many, many fields. I expected people in the social sciences-economics, psychology, philosophy, linguistics, politics, sociology, religion and numerous other areas to pick up on it. It's been somewhat of a mystery to me why even to this day, so few social scientists have discovered how useful it could be. Instead, Fuzzy Logic was first embraced by engineers and used in industrial process controls and in "smart" consumer products such as hand-held camcorders that cancel out jittering and microwaves that cook your food perfectly at the touch of a single button. I didn't expect it to play out this way back in 1965."

"I can't say that anything has been "exciting". Rather, I would choose the word "interesting". Not too long ago, the Chinese University of Hong Kong conducted a survey to determine which consumer products were using Fuzzy Logic. The result was a thick report, some 150-200 pages long-washing machines, camcorders, microwave ovens, etc. What interested me wasn't the particular applications so much as the breadth of applications-so many products were incorporating Fuzzy Logic."

"In mathematics, logic, linguistics, and other abstract disciplines, the systems are not assigned to objects. They are defined by an enumeration of the variables, their admissible values, and their algebraic, topological, grammatical, and other properties which, in the given case, determine the relations between the variables under consideration."

"I would like to comment briefly on Professor Zadeh's presentation. His proposals could be severely, ferociously, even brutally criticized from a technical point of view. This would be out of place here. But a blunt question remains: Is professor Zadeh presenting important ideas or is he indulging in wishful thinking? No doubt Professor Zadeh's enthusiasm for fuzziness has been reinforced by the prevailing climate in the U.S.-one of unprecedented permissiveness. 'Fuzzification, is a kind of scientific permissiveness; it tends to result in socially appealing slogans unaccompanied by the discipline of hard scientific work and patient observation."

"A frequent source of misunderstanding has to do with the interpretation of fuzzy logic. The problem is that the term fuzzy logic has two different meanings. More specifically, in a narrow sense, fuzzy logic, FLn, is a logical system which may be viewed as an extension and generalization of classical multivalued logics. But in a wider sense, fuzzy logic, FLw is almost synonymous with the theory of fuzzy sets. In this context, what is important to recognize is that: (a) FLw is much broader than FLn and subsumes FLn as one of its branches; (b) the agenda of FLn is very different from the agendas of classical multivalued logics; and (c) at this juncture, the term fuzzy logic is usually used in its wide rather than narrow sense, effectively equating fuzzy logic with FLw"

"To what degree is something true or false?"

"The question really isn't whether I'm American, Russian, Iranian, Azerbaijani, or anything else. I've been shaped by all these people and cultures and I feel quite comfortable among all of them."

"The term fuzzy logic is used in this paper to describe an imprecise logical system, FL, in which the truth-values are fuzzy subsets of the unit interval with linguistic labels such as true, false, not true, very true, quite true, not very true and not very fake, etc.... As a consequence, the truth tables and the rules of inference in fuzzy logic are (i) inexact and (ii) dependent on the meaning associated with the primary truth-value true as well as the modifiers very quite."

"A linguistic variable is a variable whose values are words or sentences in a natural or synthetic language."

"Well, I knew it was going to be important. That much I knew. In fact, I had thought about sealing it in a dated envelope with my predictions and then opening it 20-30 years later to see if my intuitions were right. I realized this paper marked a new direction. I used to think about it this way-that one day Fuzzy Logic would turn out to be one of the most important things to come out of our Electrical Engineering Computer Systems Division at Berkeley. I never dreamed it would become a worldwide phenomenon. My expectations were much more modest."

"No classification is complete and perfect for all purposes."

"Essentially, a fuzzy algorithm is an ordered sequence of instructions (like a computer program) in which some of the instructions may contain labels or fuzzy sets, e.g.: Reduce x slightly if y is very large Increase x very slightly if y is not very large and not very small If x is small then stop; otherwise increase x by 2."

"In general, complexity and precision bear an inverse relation to one another in the sense that, as the complexity of a problem increases, the possibility of analysing it in precise terms diminishes. Thus 'fuzzy thinking' may not be deplorable, after all, if it makes possible the solution of problems which are much too complex for precise analysis."

"[ Fuzzy logic is ] a logic whose distinguishing features are (i) fuzzy truth-values expressed in linguistic terms, e.g., true, very true, more or less true, or somewhat true, false, nor very true and not very false, etc2.; (2) imprecise truth tables; and (3) rules of inference whose validity is relative to a context rather than exact."

"More often than not, the classes of objects encountered in the real physical world do not have precisely defined criteria of membership. For example, the class of animals clearly includes dogs, horses, birds, etc. as its members, and clearly excludes such objects as rocks, fluids, plants, etc. However, such objects as starfish, bacteria, etc. have an ambiguous status with respect to the class of animals. The same kind of ambiguity arises in the case of a number such as 10 in relation to the “class” of all real numbers which are much greater than 1."

"A linguistic variable is defined as a variable whose values are sentences in a natural or artificial language."

"It was a biologist — Ludwig von Bertalanffy — who long ago perceived the essential unity of system concepts and techniques in the various fields of science and who in writings and lectures sought to attain recognition for “general systems theory” as a distinct scientific discipline. It is pertinent to note, however, that the work of Bertalannfy and his school, being motivated primarily by problems arising in the study of biological systems, is much more empirical and qualitative in spirit than the work of those system theorists who received their training in exact sciences. In fact, there is a fairly wide gap between what might be regarded as “animate” system theorists and “inanimate” system theorists at the present time, and it is not at all certain that this gap will be narrowed, much less closed, in the near future. There are some who feel this gap reflects the fundamental inadequacy of the conventional mathematics—the mathematics of precisely defined points, functions, sets, probability measures, etc.—for coping with the analysis of biological systems, and that to deal effectively with such systems, we need a radically different kind of mathematics, the mathematics of fuzzy or cloudy quantities which are not describable in terms of probability distributions. Indeed the need for such mathematics is becoming increasingly apparent even in the realms of inanimate systems"

"The advent of the Computer age has stimulated a rapid expansion in the use of quantitative techniques for the analysis of economic, urban, social, biological and other types of systems in which it is the animate rather than in dominant role. At present, most of the techniques employed for the analysis of humanistic, i.e., human centred systems are adaptations of the methods that have been developed over a long period of time for dealing with mechanistic systems, i.e., physical systems governed in the main by-the laws of mechanics, electromagnetism, and thermodynamics. The remarkable successes of these methods in unraveling the secrets of nature and enabling us to build better and better machines have inspired a widely held belief that the same or similar techniques can be applied with comparable effectiveness to the analysis of humanistic systems."

"A fuzzy set is a class of objects with a continuum of grades of membership. Such a set is characterized by a membership (characteristic) function which assigns to each object a grade of membership ranging between zero and one. The notions of inclusion, union, intersection, complement, relation, convexity, etc., are extended to such sets, and various properties of these notions in the context of fuzzy sets are established. In particular, a separation theorem for convex fuzzy sets is proved without requiring that the fuzzy sets be disjoint."

"[T]he successes of modern control theory in the design of highly accurate space navigation systems have stimulated its use in the theoretical analyses of economic and biological systems. Similarly, the effectiveness of computer simulation techniques in the macroscopic analyses of physical systems has brought into vogue the use of computer-based econometric models for purposes of forecasting, economic planning, arid management."

"Applying this approach, systems belonging to different scientific disciplines are investigated in their natural forms. On the basis of experimental results, isomorphic relations between different systems are studied and, finally, some general principles applicable for all systems of a certain class are formulated."

"Among the various paradigmatic changes in science and mathematics in this century, one such change concerns the concept of uncertainty. In science, this change has been manifested by a gradual transition from the traditional view, which insists that uncertainty is undesirable in science and should be avoided by all possible means, to an alternative view, which is tolerant of uncertainty and insists that science cannot avoid it. According to the traditional view, science should strive for certainty in all its manifestations (precision, specificity, sharpness, consistency, etc.); hence, uncertainty (imprecision, nonspecificity, vagueness, inconsistency,etc.) is regarded as unscientific. According to the alternative (or modem) view, uncertainty is considered essential to science; it is not only an unavoidable plague, but it has, in fact, a great utility."

"Crocker's Rules didn't give you the right to say anything offensive, but other people could say potentially offensive things to you, and it was your responsibility not to be offended. This was surprisingly hard to explain to people; many people would read the careful explanation and hear, "Crocker's Rules mean you can say offensive things to other people.""

"Crocker stumbled across Wikipedia early on. There were gaping holes in the encyclopedia's content, so he pitched in. As a semiprofessional poker player, he wrote the site's original poker article. As a fan of the martini, he wrote about that topic. "In the early days, it was pretty easy to find topics that needed to be covered," Crocker said. "It's not that easy today. It's pretty complete." Crocker wrote entries about Ken Kesey, Walter Annenberg, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and dozens of other topics. "Nowadays I'm not as active, but I still write," he said. "I spent a couple of hours on Wikipedia every day for a long time." In addition to writing articles, Crocker wrote new wiki software when the original program proved too slow to handle the site's growing popularity. Crocker embraced Wikipedia because he believes information should be free."

"Declaring yourself to be operating by "Crocker's Rules" means that other people are allowed to optimize their messages for information, not for being nice to you. Crocker's Rules means that you have accepted full responsibility for the operation of your own mind — if you're offended, it's your fault. Anyone is allowed to call you a moron and claim to be doing you a favor. (Which, in point of fact, they would be. One of the big problems with this culture is that everyone's afraid to tell you you're wrong, or they think they have to dance around it.) Two people using Crocker's Rules should be able to communicate all relevant information in the minimum amount of time, without paraphrasing or social formatting. Obviously, don't declare yourself to be operating by Crocker's Rules unless you have that kind of mental discipline. Note that Crocker's Rules does not mean you can insult people; it means that other people don't have to worry about whether they are insulting you. Crocker's Rules are a discipline, not a privilege. Furthermore, taking advantage of Crocker's Rules does not imply reciprocity. How could it? Crocker's Rules are something you do for yourself, to maximize information received — not something you grit your teeth over and do as a favor."

"If you declare Crocker's Rules, other people don't need to worry about being tactful to you. (You still need to worry about being tactful to them — Crocker's Rules only work one way.)"

"Aaron believed that [...] you literally ought to be asking yourself all the time: "What is the most important thing I could be working on in the world right now, and if you are not working on that, why aren't you?""

"I think that the best legacy that — the best tribute we can pay to Aaron’s legacy is to continue to fight as hard as we can to make this world a more just, fairer place. That’s the thing that he cared most about. And I’m going to keep doing that. … I also hope that this can serve as a wake-up call for the broader issues in the criminal justice system. It’s not just this one act. Our system is deeply, deeply unfair. And as I said earlier, millions of people suffer because of it needlessly. And I hope that — you know, in this country, it’s very hard for people to — for politicians to look weak on crime, but that’s not what this is. This is — this is about justice, and nobody should have to face what Aaron faced. And I hope we can help save people in the future."

"Every time you saw Aaron, he was surrounded by five or 10 different people who loved and respected and worked with him. He was depressed because he was increasingly recognizing that the idealism he brought to this fight maybe wasn’t enough. When he saw all of his wealth gone, and he recognized his parents were going to have to mortgage their house so he could afford a lawyer to fight a government that treated him as if he were a 9/11 terrorist, as if what he was doing was threatening the infrastructure of the United States, when he saw that and he recognized how — how incredibly difficult that fight was going to be, of course he was depressed. Now, you know, I’m not a psychiatrist. I don’t know whether there was something wrong with him because of — you know, beyond the rational reason he had to be depressed, but I don’t — I don’t — I don’t have patience for people who want to say, "Oh, this was just a crazy person; this was just a person with a psychological problem who killed himself." No. This was somebody — this was somebody who was pushed to the edge by what I think of as a kind of bullying by our government. A bullying by our government. And just as we hold people responsible when their bullying leads to tragedy, I hope Carmen Ortiz does what MIT did and … lead an investigation, ask somebody independent to look at what happened here and explain to America: Is this what the United States government is?"

"Two weeks ago today, Aaron Swartz was killed. Killed because he faced an impossible choice. Killed because he was forced into playing a game he could not win — a twisted and distorted perversion of justice — a game where the only winning move was not to play. Anonymous immediately convened an emergency council to discuss our response to this tragedy. After much heavy-hearted discussion, the decision was upheld to engage the United States Department of Justice and its associated executive branches in a game of a similar nature, a game in which the only winning move is not to play."

"We’ve lost a fighter. We’ve lost somebody who put huge energy into righting wrongs. There are people around the world who take it on themselves to just try to fix the world but very few of them do it 24/7 like Aaron. Very few of them are as dedicated. So of the people who are fighting for right, and what he was doing up to the end was fighting for right, we have lost one of our own. … We’ve lost a great person. But also, we’ve lost somebody who needed to be nurtured, who needed to be protected. I didn’t work with Aaron as closely as many people here, but I got the sense that all who have known him realized that he needed to be protected. He needed to be held carefully in our hands. He needed to be nurtured. So nurturers of the world, everyone who tried to make a place safe to work or a home safe to live, anyone who listens to another, looks after another or feeds another, all parents everywhere — we’ve lost a child. And there’s nothing worse than that."

"Aaron, a hero of the internet and a legend among men, was targeted by a corrupt system that sought to make an example out of him. He faced a harsher punishment than murderers, robbers, child pornographers, or even terrorist sympathizers! All for doing nothing more than downloading academic articles."

"Aaron had an unbeatable combination of political insight, technical skill, and intelligence about people and issues. I think he could have revolutionized American (and worldwide) politics. His legacy may still yet do so. Somewhere in there, Aaron's recklessness put him right in harm's way. Aaron snuck into MIT and planted a laptop in a utility closet, used it to download a lot of journal articles (many in the public domain), and then snuck in and retrieved it. This sort of thing is pretty par for the course around MIT, and though Aaron wasn't an MIT student, he was a fixture in the Cambridge hacker scene, and associated with Harvard, and generally part of that gang, and Aaron hadn't done anything with the articles (yet), so it seemed likely that it would just fizzle out. Instead, they threw the book at him. Even though MIT and JSTOR (the journal publisher) backed down, the prosecution kept on."

"The people rose up, and they caused a sea change in Washington — not the press, which refused to cover the story — just coincidentally, their parent companies all happened to be lobbying for the bill; not the politicians, who were pretty much unanimously in favor of it; and not the companies, who had all but given up trying to stop it and decided it was inevitable. It was really stopped by the people, the people themselves. They killed the bill dead, so dead that when members of Congress propose something now that even touches the Internet, they have to give a long speech beforehand about how it is definitely not like SOPA; so dead that when you ask congressional staffers about it, they groan and shake their heads like it’s all a bad dream they’re trying really hard to forget; so dead that it’s kind of hard to believe this story, hard to remember how close it all came to actually passing, hard to remember how this could have gone any other way. But it wasn’t a dream or a nightmare; it was all very real. And it will happen again. Sure, it will have yet another name, and maybe a different excuse, and probably do its damage in a different way. But make no mistake: The enemies of the freedom to connect have not disappeared. The fire in those politicians’ eyes hasn’t been put out. There are a lot of people, a lot of powerful people, who want to clamp down on the Internet. And to be honest, there aren’t a whole lot who have a vested interest in protecting it from all of that. Even some of the biggest companies, some of the biggest Internet companies, to put it frankly, would benefit from a world in which their little competitors could get censored. We can’t let that happen."

"We won this fight because everyone made themselves the hero of their own story. Everyone took it as their job to save this crucial freedom. They threw themselves into it. They did whatever they could think of to do. They didn’t stop to ask anyone for permission. … The senators were right: The Internet really is out of control. But if we forget that, if we let Hollywood rewrite the story so it was just big company Google who stopped the bill, if we let them persuade us we didn’t actually make a difference, if we start seeing it as someone else’s responsibility to do this work and it’s our job just to go home and pop some popcorn and curl up on the couch to watch Transformers, well, then next time they might just win. Let’s not let that happen."

"From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The “property” Aaron had “stolen,” we were told, was worth “millions of dollars” — with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed."

"Aaron’s commitment to social justice was profound, and defined his life. He was instrumental to the defeat of an Internet censorship bill; he fought for a more democratic, open, and accountable political system; and he helped to create, build, and preserve a dizzying range of scholarly projects that extended the scope and accessibility of human knowledge. He used his prodigious skills as a programmer and technologist not to enrich himself but to make the Internet and the world a fairer, better place. His deeply humane writing touched minds and hearts across generations and continents. He earned the friendship of thousands and the respect and support of millions more. Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims."

"Geeks seem a lot more willing to treat people based on what they can do rather than who they are. This isn’t unique to kids, of course. The Internet has an amazingly liberating aspect for everyone from blacks to the blind. So perhaps that’s one reason why I’m especially concerned about draconian proposals for an “Internet Drivers License” or a crackdown on anonymity. Quite aside from the impracticality and ineffectiveness of these proposals, they could have the effect of tagging who people are, and reintroducing those indicators that the Internet has removed."

"On the one hand, I want to be very open about everything, On the other, I heavily defend people’s right to privacy. Of course, as you point out, keeping your privacy is hard because if you slip once, it’s out there forever. I’m not sure what to say to people who want to protect their privacy except, be careful when you give out private information and think about where it could end up."

"The law about what is stealing is very clear. Stealing is taking something away from someone so they cannot use it. There’s no way that making a copy of something is stealing under that definition. If you make a copy of something, you’ll be prosecuted for copyright infringement or something similar — not larceny (the legal term for stealing). Stealing, like piracy and intellectual property, is another one of those terms cooked up to make us think of intellectual works the same way we think of physical items. But the two are very different. You can’t just punish people because they took away a “potential sale”. Earthquakes take away potential sales, as do libraries and rental stores and negative reviews. Competitors also take away potential sales."

"Think deeply about things. Don’t just go along because that’s the way things are or that’s what your friends say. Consider the effects, consider the alternatives, but most importantly, just think."

"I’m a teenage kid who’s interested in improving the world (mostly through law, politics, and technology). This year, I’m going to try to update my weblog daily with interesting thoughts, program some interesting new website software, and work on some website projects that help people better understand what’s going on in American politics."

"There’s a battle going on right now, a battle to define everything that happens on the Internet in terms of traditional things that the law understands. Is sharing a video on BitTorrent like shoplifting from a movie store? Or is it like loaning a videotape to a friend? Is reloading a webpage over and over again like a peaceful virtual sit-in or a violent smashing of shop windows? Is the freedom to connect like freedom of speech or like the freedom to murder? This bill would be a huge, potentially permanent, loss. If we lost the ability to communicate with each other over the Internet, it would be a change to the Bill of Rights. The freedoms guaranteed in our Constitution, the freedoms our country had been built on, would be suddenly deleted. New technology, instead of bringing us greater freedom, would have snuffed out fundamental rights we had always taken for granted."