0000000000060054
AUTHOR
Rudolf Seising
Fuzziness, Philosophy, and Medicine
In his Handbook of Analytic Philosophy of Medicine, a book that in our view is qualified to be the starting point of a new discourse in the fields of Theoretical Medicine and Philosophy of Medicine, Kazem Sadegh-Zadeh uses two scientific theories that are studied and regarded in many specific sectors of hard and human sciences but not globally well-known in Philosophy of Medicine: Fuzzy Set Theory and Structuralism. This opening contribution briefly discusses those approaches, and introduces the musing, ideas, counterpoints and contributions from many other authors, among them philosophers, logicians, mathematicians and researchers from different and competing disciplines, that constitute t…
Having the Final Say: Machine Support of Ethical Decisions of Doctors
Machines that support highly complex decisions of doctors have been a reality for almost half a century. In the 1950s, computer-supported medical diagnostic systems started with “punched cards in a shoe box”. In the 1960s and 1970s medicine was, to a certain extent, transformed into a quantitative science by intensive interdisciplinary research collaborations of experts from medicine, mathematics and electrical engineering; This was followed by a second shift in research on machine support of medical decisions from numerical probabilistic to knowledge based approaches. Solutions of the later form came to be known as (medical) expert systems, knowledge based systems research or Artificial In…
Fuzziness, Cognition and Cybernetics: a historical perspective
In the present paper, we connect some old reflections about the relationships existing between the theory of fuzzy sets and cybernetics with modern, contemporary analyses of the crucial (better: unavoidable) role that fuzziness plays in the attempts at scientifically describing aspects of information sciences. The connection, which has a basic conceptual origin, has been triggered also by the recent 50th anniversary of Norbert Wiener’s death which has been instrumental in looking again at some crucial aspects of the birth of information sciences in the midst of the last century. Fuzzy sets are an essential part of this revolution and share all the innovations as well as the difficulties of …
The Webbed Emergence of Fuzzy Sets and Computer Science Education from Electrical Engineering
Historically, Computer science emerged from electrical engineering and from mathematics in the 1960s. From the content of some unpublished documents and also some rather less-well-known papers by Lotfi A. Zadeh it is argued that the emergences of Computer science and Fuzzy Set Theory have been interlinked. Zadeh’s task as Chair of the Electrical Engineering Department in Berkeley in the 1960s, his activities in Education of Engineering and his creation of the theory of Fuzzy sets generated his view on the scientific discipline of Com- puter science as a fuzzy set. This view could establish a new approach to history and philosophy of science.
Designing Cognitive Cities
The following text intends to give an introduction into some of the basic ideas which determined the conception of this book. Thus, the first part of this article introduces the terms “City”, “Smart City” and “Cognitive City”. The second part gives an overview of design theories and approaches such as Action Design Research and Ontological Design (a concept in-the-making), in order to deduce from a theoretical point of view some of the principles that needs to be taken into account when designing the Cognitive City. The third part highlights some concrete techniques that can be usefully applied to the problem of citizen communication for Cognitive Cities (namely Metaheuristics, Fuzzy Sets a…
Fuzziness, Cognition and Cybernetics: an outlook on future
In the present paper, we connect some old reflections about the relationships existing between the theory of fuzzy sets and cybernetics with modern, contemporary analyses of the crucial (better: unavoidable) role that fuzziness plays in the attempts at scientifically describing aspects of information sciences. The connection, which has a basic conceptual origin, has been triggered also by the recent 50th anniversary of Norbert Wiener’ death which has been instrumental in looking again at some crucial aspects of the birth of information sciences in the midst of last Century. Fuzzy sets are an essential part of this revolution and share all the innovations as well as the difficulties of this …
A very brief history of soft computing: Fuzzy Sets, artificial Neural Networks and Evolutionary Computation
This paper gives a brief presentation of history of Soft Computing considered as a mix of three scientific disciplines that arose in the mid of the 20th century: Fuzzy Sets and Systems, Neural Networks, and Evolutionary Computation. The paper shows the genesis and the historical development of the three disciplines and also their meeting in a coalition in the 1990s.