IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine - February 2020 - 17

In
Memoriam

Bernadette Bouchon-Meunier
Paris, FRANCE
Piero P. Bonissone
San Diego, USA
Jim Bezdek
Pensacola, FL USA

Obituary for Enrique H. Ruspini

n October 15, 2019, the IEEE
Computational Intelligence
Society (CIS) lost a great volunteer, Dr. Enrique Ruspini, who
devoted a large portion of his professional life to the conception, development and growth of CIS. On the same
day, our scientific community lost a
great scientist, as Enrique was one of
the first pioneers in fuzzy clustering
and approximate reasoning, providing a
similarity-based interpretation of fuzzy
logic. Finally, Bernadette, Piero, and
Jim, and many of us lost Enrique, a
great friend, who was always ready to
help on a moment's notice.
It is difficult to describe Enrique in a
few words, and it is even more difficult to
separate the volunteer from the scientist.
Enrique H. Ruspini received his degree of Licenciado en Ciencias Matemáticas
from the University of Buenos Aires,
Argentina, and his doctoral degree in System Science from the University of California at Los Angeles. He was one of the
earliest contributors to the development
of fuzzy set theory and its applications,
having introduced its use to the treatment
of numerical classification and clustering
problems. He also made significant contributions to the understanding of the
foundations of fuzzy logic and approximate reasoning methods. His recent
research focused on the applications of
fuzzy logic techniques to the development of systems for intelligent control of
teams of autonomous robots, information
retrieval, qualitative description of comDigital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCI.2019.2954637
Date of current version: 10 January 2020

Enrique H. Ruspini

plex objects, and knowledge discovery
and pattern matching in large databases.
Dr. Ruspini was the author of over
100 original research papers, a Life Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and

Electronics Engineers, a First Fellow of
the International Fuzzy Systems Association, a Fulbright Scholar, and an SRI
Institute Fellow. He received the Meritorious Service Award of the IEEE
Neural Networks Society for leading
the transition of the Neural Networks
Council into Society status.
Jim still remembers when he was sitting with Enrique on the flight home
from the International Congress for
Cybernetics and Systems, which was
held in Acapulco in 1980. At that time
there were no professional organizations dedicated to fuzzy sets and system
models, so they decided to form one.
Enrique led the way, recruiting Lotfi
Zadeh, who then recruited King-Sun
Fu, to help us in this endeavor. Without

FIGURE 1 Top Row: Piero Bonissone, Jim Bezdek, Enrique Ruspini; Middle Row: Marc
Roubens, Philippe Smets, Janet Efstathiou, Richard Tong, Ronald Yager, Elie Sanchez; Bottom
Row: Paul Wang, Abe Mamdani, Tanya Bezdek, King-Sun Fu, Jim Yao, Lorenza Saitta.

FEBRUARY 2020 | IEEE COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE MAGAZINE

IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine - February 2020

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