Author of FuzzyJess Talks About AI and Java

ver May 17-20, 2004, I had the pleasure of attending the 17th International Conference on Industrial and Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems (IEA/AIE 2004) in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. I was a guest of Robert (Bob) Orchard, Group Leader of the Integrated Reasoning Group at the Institute for Information Technology - National Research Council of Canada. Bob is the author of FuzzyJess, the Java-based, fuzzy logic API extension to Jess, and a veteran of many expert systems projects.

Fuzzy logic, which models systems with imprecise or vague data, is used in many modern control, financial, and decision support systems. Fuzzy rules are often used to model complex business logic and business decision scenarios. Tools like FuzzyJ and FuzzyJess enable Java programmers to integrate fuzzy-rules into their applications.

The conference gave me a unique opportunity to discuss with Bob many interesting observations about the state of artificial intelligence (AI), expert systems (ES), and the richness of possibilities for Java developers to utilize his tools for building fuzzy rule-based expert systems.