Bonissone honored with IEEE Award
Longtime computer scientist Piero P. Bonissone was selected to receive the Fuzzy Systems Pioneer Award from IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS). The Fuzzy Pioneer Award is the highest honor given by the IEEE CIS and recognizes the significance of contributions made at least 15 years prior to the award date.
Honorees have contributed to the advancement of theory, technologies, and/or applications of fuzzy systems by inventing new technologies, creating innovative technical developments, implementing new products, or managing innovative product design or production processes. CATS, which was one of the first industrial applications for fuzzy logic, grew out of Piero’s vision that artificial intelligence would facilitate “reasoning with uncertainty” and enable significant industrial opportunities, especially in the area of knowledge engineering.
Piero, who was named Chief Scientist for Software Sciences and Analytics in 2007, will receive his award in June at the 2012 World Congress of Computational Intelligence in Brisbane, Australia.
Getting on board
“When I joined GE Global Research in 1979, it was like someone opened a door to a world of opportunities,” Piero said. “I had just come from UC Berkeley, where I had studied fuzzy logic, expert systems, and artificial intelligence. I recognized that I had the unique opportunity to introduce concepts to GE that didn’t exist at that time. I also had to, for lack of a better word, convince people that my theories about artificial intelligence could in fact be implemented in the face of ‘healthy skepticism’.”
Since those early pioneering days, Piero has gone on to develop, deploy and maintain a vast array of intelligent systems. Based on his initial experiences that systems need to evolve so they can adapt to ever-changing environments, he incorporated evolutionary algorithms that used automated processes to create intelligent systems. In doing this, he created a repeatable process that doesn’t require manual intervention for every step of the intelligent system lifecycle, and that can be maintained by the end users. Today, these systems can be found in multiple GE businesses, generating large financial impact.
“This is a tremendous honor for Piero, and speaks to the foresight that he – and Global Research – had in exploring applications of fuzzy logic at a time when these concepts were in their industrial infancy,” said Bill Ruh, Vice President, Global Software Center.
“When I began working on fuzzy logic, there was no clear path as to where it would lead,” Piero noted. “There are always risks in a research environment, especially when the field is brand new. The fact that this award is given for work I did 25+ years ago, and that is still impactful today, is proof that one can move forward without having a pre-defined path, as long as you can envision what your final goal is.”
To learn more about Piero and his award, click here, for an excerpt from the announcement in the November 2011 IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine or visit the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society website.
Image below is of Piero Bonissone (seated) with locomotive expert Dave Smith, from a 1985 CONTROL ENGINEERING article on CATS.
