From: earlcox@earlcoxreports.com   
      
   Has any one noticed and have any thoughts on the fact that it has been a   
   loooooong time since   
   we've seen a fuzzy logic conference in the United States?   
      
   While attending conferences in Korea, Turkey, Germany, Poland, Australia,   
   etc.   
   may be fine for professors and students, the lack of conferences in the US   
   continues   
   to exclude American business executives. These are the people we need to   
   educate in   
   the power and capabilities of fuzzy reasoning to address highly complex,   
   non-linear   
   information problems. After 40 years fuzzy logic still remains controversial   
   and only sparsely   
   used throughout American business. Business Executives -- who have real   
   problems,   
   budgets, and signatory authority -- cannot and will not travel nor send   
   their technology   
   staffs around the world to attend conferences.   
      
   With little exposure to fuzzy logic, businesses remain biased by the ocean   
   of   
   misinformation about this technology offered by statisticians, neural   
   network developers,   
   and those who continue to view fuzzy logic as "probability for the   
   uneducated"   
   (as a project manager at a Fortune 100 financial institution told me   
   recently). Hence   
   it is little wonder that post grads who specialize in fuzzy systems remain   
   in academia   
   and thus continue to teach new generations of grads who stay in academia or   
   go to   
   work in the equivalent private environments (such as Sandia labs or   
   government labs).   
   This becomes a vicious cycle that has kept fuzzy logic an arcane concern of   
   a few   
   professors over the past four decades!   
      
   We can see this clearly in the contents of this news group. While other news   
   groups   
   discuss the mechanics and theory of their fields, the fuzzy logic news   
   groups, with   
   very few recent  exceptions, continues to be haunted by students who need   
   information   
   about fuzzy logic or bullies who wade in with their proofs that either fuzzy   
   logic   
   doesn't work or (over and over and over and over again) that fuzzy logic is   
   another form of probability. When was the last time we had robust   
   discussions   
   about the techniques and meaning of defuzzification, the nature of evidence   
   in   
   fuzzy models, the techniques for running fuzzy rules in parallel, the use of   
   fuzzy   
   models in time series analysis, fuzzy data mining techniques, etc.   
      
   Well, just a Christmas Eve observation,   
   Earl   
      
      
   --   
      
      
   EarlCoxReports, LLC   
   Insight, Intelligence & Tools   
   www.earlcoxreports.com   
      
   AUTHOR:   
   "The Fuzzy Systems Handbook" (1994)   
   "Fuzzy Logic for Business and Industry" (1995)   
   "Beyond Humanity: CyberEvolution and Future Minds"   
   (1996, with Greg Paul, Paleontologist/Artist)   
   "The Fuzzy Systems Handbook, 2nd Ed." (1998)   
   "Fuzzy Tools for Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery"   
   (due Early Spring, 2004)   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)