Bart Kosko
American academic
Bart Andrew Kosko (born February 7, 1960) is an American writer and professor of electrical engineering and law at the University of Southern California (USC). He is a researcher and popularizer of fuzzy logic, neural networks, and noise, and the author of several trade books and textbooks on these and related subjects of machine intelligence. He was awarded the 2022 Donald O. Hebb Award for neural learning by the International Neural Network Society.
Personal background
Kosko holds bachelor's degrees in philosophy and in economics from USC (1982), a master's degree in applied mathematics from UC San Diego (1983), a PhD in electrical engineering from UC Irvine (1987) under Allen Stubberud, and a J.D. from Concord Law School. He is an attorney licensed in California and federal court, and worked part-time as a law clerk for the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office.
Kosko is a political and religious skeptic. He is a contributing editor of the libertarian periodical Liberty, where he has published essays on "Palestinian vouchers".
Writing
Kosko's most popular book to date was the international best-seller Fuzzy Thinking, about man and machines thinking in shades of gray, and his most recent book was Noise. He has also published short fiction and the cyber-thriller novel Nanotime, about a possible World War III that takes place in two days of the year 2030. The novel's title coins the term "nanotime" to describe the time speed-up that occurs when fast computer chips, rather than slow brains, house minds.
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