Abstract

Enrique Héctor Ruspini received his degree in Mathematics from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1965 and his doctoral degree in System Science from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1977. He is also a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. Dr. Ruspini has held positions at the University of Buenos Aires, the University of Southern California, UCLA's Brain Research Institute, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, the SRI International Artificial Intelligence Center, and the European Center for Soft Computing. Dr. Ruspini, who is the recipient of the 2009 Fuzzy Systems Pioneer Award of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, received the Meritorious Service Award of the IEEE Neural Networks Society for leading the transition of the Neural Networks Council into Society status. He is one of the founding members of the North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society and the recipient of that society's King-Sun Fu Award. He is an IFSA First Fellow, an IEEE Life Fellow and a former member of the IEEE Board of Directors and past President of the IEEE Neural Networks Council. James C. Bezdek received the PhD in Applied Mathematics from Cornell University in 1973. Jim is past President of NAFIPS, IFSA and the IEEE Neural Networks Council. Dr. Bezdek was founding editor the International Journal of Approximate Reasoning and the IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems: Life fellow of the IEEE and IFSA; and a recipient of the IEEE 3rd Millennium, CIS Fuzzy Systems Pioneer, and technical field award Rosenblatt medals, and the IPMU Kempe de Feriet award. Jim's interests: woodworking, optimization, motorcycles, pattern recognition, cigars, clustering in very large data, fishing, co-clustering, blues music, gardening, poker, cluster validity and visual clustering. Jim retired in 2007, and will be coming to a university near you soon.