Systems, Man & Cybernetics - January 2015 - 16

to me, was the increasing pressure on
although I sometimes employed patacademic researchers to stay within
tern recognition methods in my own
their disciplinary confines.
research. Perhaps it was a question of
More specifically, academia's obscale in that consideration, for examsession with rankings accelerated with
ple, of all the different ways to recogU.S. News and World Report's publicanize a face did not include the types of
tion of rankings of undergraduate probroader contextual information that I
grams in 1983 and graduate programs
found of interest.
in 1987. Several other publications of
The IEEE was my primary profesrankings have followed. It has gotten
sional affiliation and remains so. Howto the point that the
ever, I was also an
only
publications
active member of the
that count in each
Human Factors SociThe early
subdiscipline are in
ety, later renamed the
1970s were an
the three journals
Human Factors and
interesting time to
with the top impact
Ergonomics Society
scores, which are
(HFES). (Much later,
become involved
based on citation
I became active in
in SMCS.
c ou nt s . F u r t he rINCOSE, INFORMS,
more, most academic
and IIE.) The coninstitutions
highly
trast between SMCS
weight funding from sponsors such as
and HFES was quite important.
the National Science Foundation and
SMCS was very much engineering
the National Institutes of Health, whose
oriented, while HFES was much more
peer review systems create enormous
focused on engineering psychology.
pressures to conform to the reigning
Put much too simply, the engineering
paradigms within each subdiscipline.
approach is concerned with how well
Thus, while academic institutions
people perform as operators and mainincreasingly advocate cross-disciplintainers of engineered systems, e.g., airary research and education, their replanes, process plants, and factories.
ward systems as orchestrated by each
The engineering context is a critical
subdiscipline have steadily increased
consideration.
the pressure for disciplinary conforIn contrast, the engineering psymity. Over the past three decades, I
chology approach tends to address
have increasingly encountered junior
human abilities and limitations rather
faculty members who express interest
independent of context. Human abiliin but avoid cross-disciplinary endeavties to see, hear, lift, etc., are measured,
ors because they will not lead to publianalyzed, tabulated, and published for
cations and funding that count toward
both the research and design comtheir promotion and tenure.
munities. These findings can be very
Thinking about the burning issues
important for estimating parameters
within the SMCS of the early 1980s, I
within engineering models.
recall that we paid much attention to
SMCS and HFES organized quite
sustaining and growing SMCS mema few joint sessions, typically at the
bership. It has long hovered at about
HFES annual conference. We were not
5,000 members, and our efforts to
always successful in getting everyone
grow the membership were at least
to appreciate the complementary nasuccessful in avoiding decline. Durture of engineering and psychology.
ing this period, pattern analysis and
An element of this difficulty, it seemed

IEEE SyStEmS, man, & CybErnEtICS magazInE Janu ar y 2015

machine intelligence spun off from
SMCS. The IEEE Systems Council
emerged a bit later, leading to the
IEEE Systems Journal.
We also wrestled with the "man" in
SMCS. Should we become the Systems,
Humans, and Cybernetics Society?
Much energy was devoted to this question. It was argued that man referred
to mankind rather than men. In the
end, we remained the Systems, Man,
and Cybernetics Society (SMCS), but
elsewhere, human-machine systems
became the norm. Human became the
standard term rather than man.
In 1929, Richard Niebuhr published
a book, Sources on Denominationalism, in which he argues that "castes
make outcastes, and outcastes make
castes." I would like to suggest that
SMCS is the type of professional society that must continually wrestle
with outcastes and castes. Researchers and practitioners were attracted to
SMCS, at least in the 1970s and 1980s,
because their ideas, which did not fit
into the standard paradigms, were
not only tolerated but also embraced.
They also found kindred spirits who
had similar ideas.
Once a critical mass of kindred
spirits coalesced, they wanted their
own technical committee, conference workshops, and special issues
of journals. SMCS supported these
desires, and many intellectual flowers
bloomed. To a great extent, the Society
became the crossroads of serendipity.
IEEE, the broader research community, and all of us were the beneficiaries.
About the Author
William B. Rouse is the Alexander Crombie Humphreys Chair at
the Stevens Institute of Technology,
a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Life Fellow of
the IEEE, and a fellow of INCOSE,
INFORMS, and HFES.

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