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SUMMARY:Lao Tzu vs Aristotle: time to loose the black or white glasses! by
  Dr Iman Karimi - Dr Iman Karimi (University of Cambridge)
DTSTART:20110125T193000Z
DTEND:20110125T203000Z
UID:TALK29473@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:David Collins
DESCRIPTION:Over 2300 years ago Aristotle founded his eponymous logic base
 d on two "laws": law of contradiction and law of excluded middle\, or plai
 nly said\, any proposition is either correct or false\, cannot be both sim
 ultaneously and there is no third alternative. These laws became the found
 ation of not only logic\, but also mathematics and thus\, particularly thr
 ough binary logic of computers\, the majority of progresses that we are en
 joying today.\n\nA century before him and 5\,000 miles to the East\, the C
 hinese philosopher Lao Tzu eloquently controverted Aristotelian laws of lo
 gic\, with what he called "the way" in his Magnus opus Tao Te Ching. Accor
 ding to Tao\, seemingly dichotomous and contradictory poles are inextricab
 ly intertwined and interdependent\; they could\, should and do co-exist in
  unison\, as the famous Yin & Yan symbol suggests.\n\nTao remained yet ano
 ther exotic oriental relic\; even when western civilisation woke up from t
 he middle-age slumber after the defeat in the Crusades\, it primarily redi
 scovered Greek and Roman wisdom\, which were adopted by the Muslim victors
  as well. And when in 1960's Lotfi Zadeh\, an Irano-American Berkeley Prof
 essor articulated his “Fuzzy Logic" in which he mathematically formalise
 d how a proposition can be simultaneously correct and false to various deg
 rees\, he was\, fortunately not literally\, stoned by western scholars tra
 ined in the Aristotle Academia as a blasphemer. Zen-Buddhist Japan\, howev
 er\, embraced this mathematical formalisation of their way of life and cap
 tured the world with tiny cameras\, smart wash machines\, super smooth tra
 in\, based on fuzzy logic\, with a level of success that the West had no a
 lternative but to follow suit.\n\nAlmost half a century after the birth of
  fuzzy logic\, "deniers" of fuzzy logic are all but extinct in Mathematica
 l and Engineering disciplines. Outside academia\, however\, many in the we
 st still live in a monochrome world\; with me or against me. This speech w
 ould try to argue that perhaps it is time to relinquish these artificial g
 lasses...\n\n\n\nDr Iman Karimi is a lead risk analyst in Willis Re Analyt
 ics and director of Seismic Hazard as well as uncertainty streams in Willi
 s Research Network (WRN). He represented Willis in global and European ini
 tiatives such as Global Earthquake Model (GEM) and Syner-G\, and held lect
 ures in various conferences and seminars on related subjects. Having BSc a
 nd MSc in civil and earthquake engineering respectively\, he obtained his 
 doctorate (Dr.-Ing.) degree from RWTH Aachen University in 2006\, in which
  he developed a novel concept of risk assessment based on Fuzzy-Probabilit
 y. Dr Karimi’s experiences range from structural design of buildings and
  involvement in numerous projects for investigating and improving seismic 
 resistance of buildings to research and from management consulting to appl
 ication of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to in various sectors such as bank
 ing and automobile industry\, whilst having various publications on the ab
 ove subjects to his name. Dr Karimi is currently studying towards an MBA d
 egree in the Judge Business School and represents the class of 2010 in the
  faculty board
LOCATION:Nihon Room\, Foundess Court\, Pembroke College
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