Systems, Man & Cybernetics - July 2015 - 50

I joined the EE Department in
the conjunctions , and + such
1959. At that time, the EE Dethat it represents a network of cir"CS cuts across the
partment was best known for its
cuits a 1, . . . , a n (i, j = 1, f, n) .
work in electromagnetism and
By this logic, A i , A j and A i + A j
boundaries of many
microwaves. A decision was
are, respectively, series and paralestablished fields."
made to build up the area of
lel combinations of the circuits a i
circuits, systems, and control.
and a j . For the analogous interDon Pederson, Ernie Kuh, and
pretation in the case of FSs, Zadeh
Charles Desoer came from Bell
employed the concept of the sieve.
Labs. Eli Jury, Art Bergen, and I came from Columbia
He provided the membership function n i (x) of A i at x
University. [...] There wasn't much activity in the
with a sieve S i (x) with mesh size n i (x) . This interpretacomputer field at that time. [...] There was a Computtion results in immediate and clearly evident correlations
er Center in Cory Hall that was run by the EE Departof the parallel combinations of sieves S i (x) and S j (x)
ment. The principal and only figures in CS and engiwith n i (x) 0 n j (x) and of their series combinations with
neering in EE at that time were Paul Morton and
n i (x) / n j (x) (see Figure 12). Considering that the term
Harry Huskey. They can be rightly regarded as the
sieve connotes the meaning of a filter, then one may catch
progenitors of CS and engineering at Berkeley. [...]
the analogy of FSs and electrical filters, as outlined in the
When I was appointed as chairman in 1963, I was not
section "When Communication Became Mathematical."
a computer person, and I am not a computer user to
this day, I regret to say. But I was always a very strong
From EE to EECS
believer in the importance of computers and digital
In an interview, Zadeh recalled that the center of attention
technology. My first action as chairman was to send a
shifted from system theory as CS took over [27]. When
memo to the faculty in which I suggested that we asZadeh became chair of the Department of EE at UCB in
sign the highest priority to the development of CS in
1963 (Figure 13), he experienced such shifts of attention
EE. But what was obvious today was not so obvious
very intensively, for it was during his five-year tenure
then. The reaction to my memo was mixed, and some
in this position that his department was renamed the
influential faculty members objected strongly to my
Department of EE and CS (EECS) [27]. In November 1992,
proposal. [57]
Zadeh was asked to give an after-dinner talk on the histoAfter some initial difficulties, Zadeh was finally sucry of CS at UCB. In the manuscript for this talk, he wrote:
cessful in changing the name of the department to EECS.
In his 1965 paper "Electrical Engineering at the Crossroads" (Figure 14) [51], he described the problem:
The slowness with which many EE departments have
reacted to the rapidly growing demand for computer scientists and engineers, and their unwillingness to make
substantive changes in their curricula to meet the need
for specialized training in computer sciences and related
fields, is generating strong pressures on some campuses
to establish separate CS departments. [51, p. 30]
In the same paper, he presented the new EE curriculum
at UCB, writing that it
reflects the fact that, today, EE is no longer an aggregation of a small number of subject areas sharing a
large common body of concepts and techniques-as
it was in the 1930s, 1940s, and, to a lesser extent, in
the 1950s. Rather, it is an assemblage of a wide range
of subjects, falling into three major areas which have
a relatively small common core. [...] If this premise is
accepted, then the only logical conclusion is that the
student must be provided with a choice of several
basic programs, which could permit him to focus his
studies in one of the major areas falling within or
nearest to his main field of interest. [51, p. 31]
At UCB, three focused programs (electronics, fields, and
plasmas; systems, information, and control; and CSs) and a
general EE program were established [51, p. 31f].
Figure 14. An excerpt from Zadeh's 1965 paper [51].
50

IEEE Systems, Man, & Cybernetics Magazine July 2015

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