Can we use Einstein’s special theory of relativity – the speed of light is the same in all reference frames, irrespective of their relative motion — to describe the “speed of data” in a flat world of global internet economy?

It’s 130th Anniversary of Albert Einstein’s Birth!

For all his fame and glory, the man was true to his passion towards science and research — Einstein’s “miracle year”– when he published four papers that would alter the course of modern physics, happened while he was working as a clerk in a patent office.

With our worldly distractions, how many engineers and scientists will choose to pursue creativity and ideas with such selflessness?

Dr. Teuvo Kohonen received the IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award for outstanding contributions to the advancement of the theory and applications for neural networks, associative memories and the self-organizing map.

The Award was presented to him at the 2008 World Congress on Computational Intelligence hosted in Hong Kong. I was at the banquet with Dr. Kohonen when he received the award, and I shot a video clip of the ceremony. The video will be uploaded shortly (please visit this post again soon).

Dr. Tuevo Kohonen has made pivotal contributions int he fiedl of artificial neural networks, having developed the self-organizing map (SOM), a data-analysis method that helps with the problem of clustering and data exploration. SOM is regularly used in finance, trade, natural sciences and linguistics. This method and its derivatives are also used in speech recognition and robotics. The SOM method, considered by experts to be one of the most significant inventions in computational science, has been the subject of some 8000 scientific papers, a dozen books and six international workshops that haven been organized using the method. Dr. Kohonen is currently a professor and Academician at Helsinki University of Technology, Espoo, Finland. An IEEE Fellow, he has received several awards including the IEEE Neural Networks Pioneer Award, the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s Technical Achievement Award and the International Neural Network Society Lifetime Achievement Award. Dr. Kohonen holds a master’s and doctorate in engineering from Helsinki University of Technology and holds three honorary doctorates form Universitat Dortmund in Germany, Abo Akademi in Finland and University of York in England.

My “Interviews with Great Minds” is a series of video blogs with creative people who have original thoughts and who have impacted the world with their vision of future technologies.

My first guest is Professor Lotfi Zadeh.

Lotfi is the inventor of Fuzzy Logic. With every click of your camera, with every turn of your washing machine cycle, you got to give thanks to him. His thoughts and his invention have impacted the world. He changes the way we see numbers and how we analyze information.

The video below is about his sources of inspiration when he invented fuzzy logic.

From Wikipedia, I quote a number of his awards (see below).

Awards
In 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. He was awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1995 “For pioneering development of fuzzy logic and its many diverse applications.”

Zadeh has a long list of achievements, but since 2003, Zadeh has received the following awards.

Awards

In 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. He was awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1995 “For pioneering development of fuzzy logic and its many diverse applications.”

Zadeh has a long list of achievements, but since 2003, Zadeh has received the following awards.

• In 1993 Azerbaijan bestowed him an honorary Professorship from the Azerbaijan State Oil Academy.
• Outstanding Contribution Award, Web Intelligence Consortium (WIC), Halifax, Canada, 2003.
• Wall of Fame, Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum (HNF), Paderborn, Germany, 2004.
• Civitate Honoris Causa, Budapest Tech Polytechnical Institution, Budapest, Hungary; Sept. 4, 2004.
• Doctor Honoris Causa, Muroran Institute of Technology, Muroran, Japan; Oct. 29, 2004.
• Doctor Honoris Causa, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, China; Nov. 9, 2004.
• V. Kaufmann Prize and Gold Medal, International Association for Fuzzy-Set Management and Economy (SIGEF), Barcelona, Spain, Nov. 15, 2004.
• Foreign member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, 2005.
• Nicolaus Copernicus Medal of the Polish Academy of Sciences, 2005.
• J. Keith Brimacombe IPMM Award in recognition of his development of fuzzy set theory and fuzzy logic, 2005.
• Doctor Honoris Causa, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain; Jan. 29, 2007.
• Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award