Jacques J. VIDAL

Dr. Jacques J. Vidal was born in Liege, Belgium. He obtained an Electrical Engineering degree from the University of Liege in 1954, After a military term ending as a Reserve First Lieuteant in the Belgian Air Force, he became a Lecturer at the University of Liege, and in the same period, earned a Nuclear Engineering Certificate in 1958 from the INSTN in Saclay, France and, in 1961, a Doctorate from the University of Paris.

He left Belgium for the United States in 1963 to join the faculty of the School of Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles.

He is now Emeritus Professor in the UCLA Computer Science Department of which he was a founding member. Although officially in retirement, he continues to work with his graduate students and at times to teach his signature class. Neural Network and Soft Computation (CS267A-B). This course has been consistently well received by students and, through multiples revisions and occasional name changes, was offered yearly for nearly thirty years.

Since the release of the Mathematica software in the early nineties, the course format evolved toward computer demonstrations in the classroom. The courseware written for this class became a continually expanding collection of Mathematica Notebooks. Some of these notebooks have also been available on the mathsource database at http://www.wri.com.

Long interested in the mysteries of the Brain, Vidal spend a sabbatical year in 1970 at the UCLA Brain Research Institute to study the mammaliam vestibular system and joined a research group headed by Professor Jose Segundo. Subsequently he was elected a permanent member of the Institute.
During the seventies, Vidal coined the expression Brain Computer Interface for his current research project, a part of a large, government sponsored futuristic research in biocybernetics and human-machine interaction. The name is now firmly entrenched into the lexicon of biocybernetics research. One of the results was the first successful attempt to include brain signals into human-computer communication, The goal of providing a non invasive communication channel into the human brain remains a contemporary challenge. A number of laboratories in the US and abroad are currently involved in related projects.

His dominant research interests, still brain-related albeit sometime indirectly, have revolved around "Soft Computing" (Neural Networks, Fuzzy Systems Genetic Search). Recently, and through his long term association with a research group at the University of Paris headed by Professor Alain-jacques Valleron, Vidal has started to explore the application of functional modeling in statistics and, in particular, to the prediction of outbreak of disease, a concern given a new importance by the emergence of bioterrorism.

Some Publications are listed below

• "Frequency Analysis of Truncation Errors in R-C Networks" (with Bawin, S.), in IEEE Trans. on Electronic Computers, April 1965, EC-14: 229-233.

• "Simulation of Field Problems using General Purpose Resistance Network Analogs", in Simulation, 7:190-203, October 1966.

• "Sensitivity Coefficients for the Correction of Quantization Errors in Hybrid Computer Systems" (with Karplus, W.J.and Keludjian, G), in Sensitivity Methods in Control Theory, Radanovis, J., ed., Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1966, p. 197-208.

• "Static and Dynamic Properties of Gravity-Sensitive Afferents in the Cat Vestibular System" (with Jeannerod, M., Levitan, H., Lifshitz, W., Rosenberg, J.and Segundo, J.), in Kybernetic, 9:205-215, 1971.

• "Toward Direct Brain-Computer Communication", in Annual Review of Biophysics and Bioengineering, L.J. Mullins, Ed., Annual Reviews, Inc., Palo Alto, Vol. 2, 1973, pp. 157-180.

• "Perturbation Effects on Stability of Gravity Receptors" (with O'Leary, D.P. and Segundo, J.P.), in Biological Cybernetics 17:99-108, Springer-Verlag, 1975.

• "An Algorithm for Determining the Topological Dimensionality and Structure from Sample Point Clusters", (with Schwartzman, D.), in IEEE Trans. on Computers, December 1975, C-24-12:1175-1182.

• "Real-Time Detection of Brain Events in EEG" , in IEEE Proceedings, May 1977, 65-5:633-641.

• "Measurement of Event-Related Potentials" (with John, E.R., Ruchkin, D.S.), in Event-Related Potentials in Man, E. Callaway, Ed., Acad. Press, 1978.

• "Generation of ECG Prototype Waveforms by Piecewise Correlation Averaging" (with Hecht, S.E.), in IEEE Trans. on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Vol. PAMI-2, No. 5, September 1980.

• "Adaptive User Interfaces for Distributed Information Management" (with Miller, L.H.and Devillez, G.), in Human-Computer Interaction, Gabriel Salvendy Ed., Elsevier Science Publishers, Amsterdam, pps. 77-81, 1984.

• "Adaptive Parallel Logic Networks," (with Martinez, T.), in Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, Vo. 5, No. 1, February 1988, pps. 26-58.

• "Implementing Neural Nets with Programmable Logic", in IEEE Transactions On Acoustics, Speech, & Signal Processing, Volume 36, Number 7, July 1988, pps. 1180-1190.

• "Artificial Neural Oscillators For Inferencing" (with Lange, T.E. and Dyer, M.G. ), in Neurocomputers & Attention, A.V. Holden and V.I. Kryukov (Editors), Volume II, Connectionism and Neurocomputers, Manchester University Press, pp. 1-13, 1990.

• "Adaptive Range Coding" (with Rosen, B., Goodwin, J.), in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 3, 486-491, Morgan Kauffman inc. ,1991 .

• "A Visualization Tool for Representing Epidemic Spread" (with Garnerin, Ph. and Valleron A-j), in Mathematica Journal, Vol.1,#4, pp. 59-61,1991

• "Image Recognition and Reconstruction Using Associative Magnetic Processing" (with Goodwin, J.M and Rosen, B.E.), in International Journal Of Pattern Recognition And Artificial Intelligence, Volume 6, Number 1, pps. 157-177, April 1992.

• "Process Control With Adaptive Range Coding" (with Goodwin, J.M and Rosen, B.E.), in Biol. Cybernetics vol.66, #5):pp, 419-428, 1992

• "Cluster Network for Recognition of Handwritten , Cursive Script Characters (with Hoffman, J.. and Skrzypek, J. ), in Neural Networks, 1993, vol.6, (no.1):69-78.

• "A dual network expert system" (with Liow, R.), in Proc. IJCNN, Vol.2, pp.1670-1674, Singapore, 18-21 Nov. 1991

• "Evolving the Size of Rule-Based Fuzzy Systems" (with Cooper, M.G. ), in "Intelligent Systems" Yfantis, E.A. ed.,pp 319-326,

• "Genetic Design of Fuzzy Controllers" (with Cooper, M.G.), in "Genetic Algorithms for Pattern Recognition", S. Pal & P. Wang eds.,1995.

• "Cyberspace Bionics", in "Human Interfaces: Questions of Metholds and Practice in Cognitive Technology", J.P. Marsh, B. Gorayska and J.L. Mey, Eds., 1999 Elsevier Science B.V.

• "Early Epidemiologic Warning by Functonal Approximation of Monitored Disease Levels" (with Valleron, A.J.), in "Proceedings of the International Conference on Mathematics and Engineering Techniques in Medicine and Biological Sciences" , Faramarz Valafar ed.,2002.

• "Timely redistribution of information for epidemiological surveillance and alert: the experience from the French communicable diseases network." (with Valleron, A.J.), in "Proc AMIA Symp. 2002;:830-4".

• "A Web application to extract expert knowledge on natural history of diseases" (with Valleron, A.J., Vibert, J-F,Larouz, B.,Deuffic-Burban, S.,Mohamed, M.K.and Da lichaouche,M.), in "MEDINFO Proceedings ", 2004.

  Patents

  "Spin Glass Type Associative Processor", US Patent #4,977,540, with J. Goodwin and B. Rosen, granted 12/ 11/1990

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