Bart Andrew Kosko (born February 7, 1960) is a writer and professor of electrical engineering and law at the
University of Southern California
, mottoeng = "Let whoever earns the palm bear it"
, religious_affiliation = Nonsectarian—historically Methodist
, established =
, accreditation = WSCUC
, type = Private research university
, academic_affiliations =
, endowment = $8.1 ...
(USC). He is a researcher and popularizer of
fuzzy logic,
neural networks, and noise, and author of several trade books and textbooks on these and related subjects of
machine intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech rec ...
.
Personal background
Kosko holds bachelor's degrees in philosophy and in economics from USC (1982), a master's degree in applied mathematics from UC San Diego (1983), a PhD in electrical engineering from UC Irvine (1987) under Allen Stubberud, and a J.D. from
Concord Law School
Concord Law School (formerly Concord University School of Law), is an online law school based in Los Angeles, California. It is currently known as Concord Law School at Purdue University Global and is one of several schools within Purdue Univers ...
. He is an attorney licensed in
California
California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...
and federal court, and worked part-time as a
law clerk for the
Los Angeles District Attorney
The District Attorney of Los Angeles County is in charge of the office that prosecutes felony and misdemeanor crimes that occur within Los Angeles County, California, United States. The current district attorney (DA) is George Gascón.
Some m ...
's Office.
Kosko is a political and religious
skeptic
Skepticism, also spelled scepticism, is a questioning attitude or doubt toward knowledge claims that are seen as mere belief or dogma. For example, if a person is skeptical about claims made by their government about an ongoing war then the ...
. He is a contributing editor of the
libertarian periodical ''
Liberty
Liberty is the ability to do as one pleases, or a right or immunity enjoyed by prescription or by grant (i.e. privilege). It is a synonym for the word freedom.
In modern politics, liberty is understood as the state of being free within society fr ...
'', where he has published essays on "Palestinian vouchers".
Writing
Kosko's most popular book to date was the international best-seller ''Fuzzy Thinking'', about man and machines thinking in shades of gray, and his most recent book was ''Noise''. He has also published
short fiction
A short story is a piece of prose fiction that typically can be read in one sitting and focuses on a self-contained incident or series of linked incidents, with the intent of evoking a single effect or mood. The short story is one of the oldest ...
and the cyber-thriller
novel ''Nanotime'', about a
possible World War III that takes place in two days of the year 2030. The novel's title coins the term "nanotime" to describe the time speed-up that occurs when fast computer chips, rather than slow brains, house minds.
Kosko has a minimalist prose style, not even using commas in his book Noise.
Research
Kosko's technical contributions have been in three main areas:
fuzzy logic, neural networks, and noise.
In fuzzy logic, he introduced
fuzzy cognitive maps, fuzzy subsethood,
[http://sipi.usc.edu/~kosko/Fuzzy_Entropy_conditioning.pdf ] additive fuzzy systems,
[http://sipi.usc.edu/~kosko/GlobalStability.pdf ] fuzzy approximation theorems, optimal fuzzy rules, fuzzy associative memories, various neural-based adaptive fuzzy systems,
[ ratio measures of fuzziness,][ the shape of fuzzy sets, the conditional variance of fuzzy systems, and the geometric view of (finite) fuzzy sets as points in hypercubes and its relationship to the ongoing debate of fuzziness versus ]probability
Probability is the branch of mathematics concerning numerical descriptions of how likely an event is to occur, or how likely it is that a proposition is true. The probability of an event is a number between 0 and 1, where, roughly speakin ...
.
In neural networks, Kosko introduced the unsupervised technique of differential Hebbian learning
Hebbian theory is a neuroscientific theory claiming that an increase in synaptic efficacy arises from a presynaptic cell's repeated and persistent stimulation of a postsynaptic cell. It is an attempt to explain synaptic plasticity, the adaptatio ...
,[http://sipi.usc.edu/~kosko/UnsupervisedLearning.pdf ] sometimes called the "differential synapse," and most famously the BAM or bidirectional associative memory family of feedback neural architectures, with corresponding global stability theorems.[
In ]noise
Noise is unwanted sound considered unpleasant, loud or disruptive to hearing. From a physics standpoint, there is no distinction between noise and desired sound, as both are vibrations through a medium, such as air or water. The difference aris ...
, Kosko introduced the concept of adaptive stochastic resonance, using neural-like learning algorithms to find the optimal level of noise to add to many nonlinear systems to improve their performance. He proved many versions of the so-called "forbidden interval theorem," which guarantees that noise will benefit a system if the average level of noise does not fall in an interval of values. He also showed that noise can speed up the convergence of Markov chains to equilibrium.[http://sipi.usc.edu/~kosko/Physical-Review-Noisy-Markov-Chain-Oct2011.pdf ]
Books
;Nonfiction
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* (with coauthor Simon Haykin)
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;Fiction
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References
External links
Official site
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Kosko, Bart
1960 births
Living people
American libertarians
University of California, San Diego alumni
University of Southern California alumni
University of Southern California faculty
Probability theorists
American male novelists