From military to medical and commercial applications of neural networks and fuzzy logic: a modern “swords-into-plowshares” play

The author has spent the last three decades in the defense industry, first at Texas Instruments, Inc. in Dallas, Texas and then at Horizons Technology and the ORINCON Corporation in San Diego, California. He was fortunate to be a graduate student at Stanford during the birth of neural network structures in the early 1960s by Dr. Bernard Widrow and the birth of fuzzy logic at nearby UC Berkeley by Dr. Lotfi Zadeh. Considering himself doubly blessed by knowing both these seminal creators personally, he offers the following historical perspective on the peaceful transformation of neural and fuzzy pattern recognition structures and decision aids originally developed in “cold war” time to benefit mankind with useful medical and commercial applications in our slightly more peaceful world