26 September 2014

Systems Engineering: Information Processing (Just the Quotes)

"The term 'systems engineering' is a term with an air of romance and of mystery. The romance and the mystery come from its use in the field of guided missiles, rockets, artificial satellites, and space flight. Much of the work being done in these areas is classified and hence much of it is not known to the general public or to this writer. […] From a business point of view, systems engineering is the creation of a deliberate combination of human services, material services, and machine service to accomplish an information processing job. But this is also very nearly a definition of business system analysis. The difference, from a business point of view, therefore, between business system analysis and systems engineering is only one of degree. In general, systems engineering is more total and more goal-oriented in its approach [...]." ("Computers and People" Vol. 5, 1956)

"Cybernetics is the science of the process of transmission, processing and storage of information." (Sergei Sobolew, Woprosy Psychology, 1958)

"The notion of a fuzzy set provides a convenient point of departure for the construction of a conceptual framework which parallels in many respects the framework used in the case of ordinary sets, but is more general than the latter and, potentially, may prove to have a much wider scope of applicability, particularly in the fields of pattern classification and information processing. Essentially, such a framework provides a natural way of dealing with problems in which the source of imprecision is the absence of sharply denned criteria of class membership rather than the presence of random variables." (Lotfi A Zadeh, "Fuzzy Sets", 1965)

"The great difference between the graphic representation of yesterday, which was poorly dissociated from the figurative image, and the graphics of tomorrow, is the disappearance of the congential fixity of the image. […] When one can superimpose, juxtapose, transpose, and permute graphic images in ways that lead to groupings and classings, the graphic image passes from the dead image, the 'illustration,' to the living image, the widely accessible research instrument it is now becoming. The graphic is no longer only the 'representation' of a final simplification, it is a point of departure for the discovery of these simplifications and the means for their justification. The graphic has become, by its manageability, an instrument for information processing." (Jacques Bertin, "Semiology of graphics" ["Semiologie Graphique"], 1967)

"The greater the uncertainty, the greater the amount of decision making and information processing. It is hypothesized that organizations have limited capacities to process information and adopt different organizing modes to deal with task uncertainty. Therefore, variations in organizing modes are actually variations in the capacity of organizations to process information and make decisions about events which cannot be anticipated in advance." (John K Galbraith, "Organization Design", 1977)

"The effective communication of information in visual form, whether it be text, tables, graphs, charts or diagrams, requires an understanding of those factors which determine the 'legibility', 'readability' and 'comprehensibility', of the information being presented. By legibility we mean: can the data be clearly seen and easily read? By readability we mean: is the information set out in a logical way so that its structure is clear and it can be easily scanned? By comprehensibility we mean: does the data make sense to the audience for whom it is intended? Is the presentation appropriate for their previous knowledge, their present information needs and their information processing capacities?" (Linda Reynolds & Doig Simmonds, "Presentation of Data in Science" 4th Ed, 1984)

"Cybernetics is concerned with scientific investigation of systemic processes of a highly varied nature, including such phenomena as regulation, information processing, information storage, adaptation, self-organization, self-reproduction, and strategic behavior. Within the general cybernetic approach, the following theoretical fields have developed: systems theory (system), communication theory, game theory, and decision theory." (Fritz B Simon et al, "Language of Family Therapy: A Systemic Vocabulary and Source Book", 1985)

"Fuzziness, then, is a concomitant of complexity. This implies that as the complexity of a task, or of a system for performing that task, exceeds a certain threshold, the system must necessarily become fuzzy in nature. Thus, with the rapid increase in the complexity of the information processing tasks which the computers are called upon to perform, we are reaching a point where computers will have to be designed for processing of information in fuzzy form. In fact, it is the capability to manipulate fuzzy concepts that distinguishes human intelligence from the machine intelligence of current generation computers. Without such capability we cannot build machines that can summarize written text, translate well from one natural language to another, or perform many other tasks that humans can do with ease because of their ability to manipulate fuzzy concepts." (Lotfi A Zadeh, "The Birth and Evolution of Fuzzy Logic", 1989)

"The cybernetics phase of cognitive science produced an amazing array of concrete results, in addition to its long-term (often underground) influence: the use of mathematical logic to understand the operation of the nervous system; the invention of information processing machines (as digital computers), thus laying the basis for artificial intelligence; the establishment of the metadiscipline of system theory, which has had an imprint in many branches of science, such as engineering (systems analysis, control theory), biology (regulatory physiology, ecology), social sciences (family therapy, structural anthropology, management, urban studies), and economics (game theory); information theory as a statistical theory of signal and communication channels; the first examples of self-organizing systems. This list is impressive: we tend to consider many of these notions and tools an integrative part of our life […]" (Francisco Varela, "The Embodied Mind", 1991)

"Reliable information processing requires the existence of a good code or language, i.e., a set of rules that generate information at a given hierarchical level, and then compress it for use at a higher cognitive level. To accomplish this, a language should strike an optimum balance between variety (stochasticity) and the ability to detect and correct errors (memory)."(John L Casti, "Reality Rules: Picturing the world in mathematics", 1992)

"An artificial neural network is an information-processing system that has certain performance characteristics in common with biological neural networks. Artificial neural networks have been developed as generalizations of mathematical models of human cognition or neural biology, based on the assumptions that: (1) Information processing occurs at many simple elements called neurons. (2) Signals are passed between neurons over connection links. (3) Each connection link has an associated weight, which, in a typical neural net, multiplies the signal transmitted. (4) Each neuron applies an activation function (usually nonlinear) to its net input (sum of weighted input signals) to determine its output signal." (Laurene Fausett, "Fundamentals of Neural Networks", 1994)

"In spite of the insurmountable computational limits, we continue to pursue the many problems that possess the characteristics of organized complexity. These problems are too important for our well being to give up on them. The main challenge in pursuing these problems narrows down fundamentally to one question: how to deal with systems and associated problems whose complexities are beyond our information processing limits? That is, how can we deal with these problems if no computational power alone is sufficient?"  (George Klir, "Fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic", 1995)

"The robustness of the misperceptions of feedback and the poor performance they cause are due to two basic and related deficiencies in our mental model. First, our cognitive maps of the causal structure of systems are vastly simplified compared to the complexity of the systems themselves. Second, we are unable to infer correctly the dynamics of all but the simplest causal maps. Both are direct consequences of bounded rationality, that is, the many limitations of attention, memory, recall, information processing capability, and time that constrain human decision making." (John D Sterman, "Business Dynamics: Systems thinking and modeling for a complex world", 2000)

"It is not only a metaphor to transform the Internet to a superbrain with self-organizing features of learning and adapting. Information retrieval is already realized by neural networks adapting to the information preferences of a human user with synaptic plasticity. In sociobiology, we can 1 earn from populations of ants and termites how to organize traffic and information processing by swarm intelligence. From a technical point of view, we need intelligent programs distributed in the nets. There are already more or less intelligent virtual organisms {'agents'), learning, self-organizing and adapting to our individual preferences of information, to select our e-mails, to prepare economic transactions or to defend the attacks of hostile computer viruses, like the immune system of our body." (Klaus Mainzer, "Complexity Management in the Age of Globalization", 2006)

"An artificial neural network, often just called a 'neural network' (NN), is an interconnected group of artificial neurons that uses a mathematical model or computational model for information processing based on a connectionist approach to computation. Knowledge is acquired by the network from its environment through a learning process, and interneuron connection strengths (synaptic weighs) are used to store the acquired knowledge." (Larbi Esmahi et al, "Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Systems", 2009)

"Many AI systems employ heuristic decision making, which uses a strategy to find the most likely correct decision to avoid the high cost (time) of processing lots of information. We can think of those heuristics as shortcuts or rules of thumb that we would use to make fast decisions." (Jesús Barrasa et al, "Knowledge Graphs: Data in Context for Responsive Businesses", 2021)

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