Lotfi A. Zadeh

Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley; Director, Berkeley Initiative in Soft Computing

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

The integrated circuit.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Question-answering systems. I use the sample question, "How many Ph.D.s in computer science were granted by European universities in 1986?" The answer involves taking some information from here and some from there. No existing search engine can do that.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

Miniaturization.

"Humans do not use classical logic when they deal with perceptions. To deal with them, you need imprecise logic, fuzzy logic. This point has not as yet been recognized. Take driving a car in city traffic. We cannot automate that. But humans drive in heavy traffic without any measurements or computation; they use analogy. All problems have this complexity scale associated with them. We have programs that can translate language to some degree, but can we translate Shakespeare? There's also the problem of summarization, which is an order of magnitude more complex than machine translation because it requires 'world knowledge'—knowledge gained from experience and education—which is largely composed of perceptions. So this huge chunk of human reasoning is outside of what computers can do unless they apply fuzzy logic."