General Chair

(“Blackjack” Bezdek)

Jim received the BS from the University of Nevada, Reno in 1969; and the Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1973. He has held various academic positions, including the head of computer science at the University of South Carolina from 1983-1987. He was appointed the Nystul eminent scholar of computer science at the University of West Florida in 1989, and holds that position at present. Dr . Bezdek has also worked for Boeing Aerospace (1981) as a visiting research scientist in their signal processing lab; and he was director of Boeing Electronics High Technology Center's Information Processing Lab from 1987-1989.

Jim's interests include statistical and fuzzy pattern recognition, blues music, computational neural networks, motorcycles, optimization, numerical analysis, woodworking, fishing and medical image processing. He is founding editor of the International Journal of Approximate Reasoning and the IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems. Dr. Bezdek is a past president of three professional societies: the North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society (NAFIPS), the International Fuzzy Systems Association (IFSA) and the IEEE Neural Networks Council, Jim is a fellow of the IEEE and a recipient of the IEEE Third Millennium medal, the NNC meritorious service award, and the NNC Fuzzy Systems Pioneer Award.  Jim has been the general chair of 6 conferences (all had a surplus):

                1^st (Founding) NAFIPS Workshop                                           Logan, Utah                      1982

                1^st (Founding) IFSA Congress                                                  Kauai, Hawaii                  1984

                3^rd IFSA  World Congress                                                           Seattle, WA                       1989

                4^th Int'l Conf. on ES Applications in Industry                    Kauai, Hawaii                  1991

                1^st (Founding) FUZZ-IEEE                                                           San Diego, CA                 1992

                17^th NAFIPS : Annual Conference                                          Pensacola, FL                  1998