Word: researchers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...business; and the dizzying price of keeping up with technology, ranging from computerized card catalogs to the latest in lab paraphernalia. Hardware and faculty often go hand in hand: when Duke lured physicist John Madey away from Stanford, it promised to build a lab for his free-electron laser research. Cost: $5 million...
...inventory. "I'm not going to speculate how much oil is left and where it is," says Sexton. As much as 25% of the crude may have evaporated in the early days after the spill. Much of the rest, guesses Lars Foyn, a fishery expert with the Marine Research Institute in Bergen, Norway, has become diluted in the water and disappeared. Most of the experts in Alaska privately agree with that dispiriting theory, but no one wants to be the first to say that the remaining oil has seeped irretrievably into the ecosystem...
...listed among works like Fuzzy Bear and Fuzzy Wuzzy Puppy, are some strange-sounding titles: Fuzzy Systems, Fuzzy Set Theory and Fuzzy Reasoning & Its Applications. The bedtime reading of scientists gone soft in the head? No, these academic tomes are the collected output of 25 years of mostly American research in fuzzy logic, a branch of mathematics designed to help computers simulate the various kinds of vagueness and uncertainty found in everyday life. Despite a distinguished corps of devoted followers, however, fuzzy logic has been largely relegated to the back shelves of computer science -- at least...
Fuzzy logic began to find applications in industry in the early '70s, when it was teamed with another form of advanced computer science called the expert system. A product of research into artificial intelligence, expert systems solve complex problems somewhat like human experts do -- by applying rules of thumb. (Example: when the oven gets very hot, turn the gas down a bit.) In 1980 F.L. Smidth & Co. of Copenhagen began marketing the first commercial fuzzy expert system: a computer program that controlled the fuel-intake rate and gas flow of a rotating kiln used to make cement...
...such resistance, perhaps because their culture is not so deeply rooted in scientific rationalism. Says Bart Kosko, a Zadeh protege and a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California: "Fuzziness begins where Western logic ends." In the early '80s several Japanese firms plunged enthusiastically into fuzzy research. By 1985 Hitachi had installed the technology's most celebrated showpiece: a subway system in Sendai, about 200 miles north of Tokyo, that is operated by a fuzzy computer. Not only does it give an astonishingly smooth ride (passengers do not need to hang on to straps...