Lotfi A. Zadeh is a Professor in the Graduate School, Computer Science Division, Department of EECS, the University of California, Berkeley. In addition, he is serving as the Director of BISC (Berkeley Initiative in Soft Computing). He is an alumnus of the University of Teheran, the MIT and the Columbia University. He held visiting appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ; MIT; IBM Research Laboratory, San Jose, CA; SRI International, Menlo Park, CA; and the Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University. His earlier work was concerned in the main with systems analysis, decision analysis and information systems. His current research is focused on fuzzy logic, computing with words and soft computing, which is a coalition of fuzzy logic, neurocomputing, evolutionary computing, probabilistic computing and parts of machine learning. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, AAAS, ACM, AAAI, and IFSA. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and the Finnish Academy of Sciences. He is a recipient of the IEEE Education Medal, the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal, the IEEE Medal of Honor, the ASME Rufus Oldenburger Medal, the B. Bolzano Medal of the Czech Academy of Sciences, the Kampe de Feriet Medal, the AACC Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award, the Grigore Moisil Prize, the Honda Prize, the Okawa Prize, the AIM Information Science Award, the IEEE-SMC J. P. Wohl Career Achievement Award, the SOFT Scientific Contribution Memorial Award of the Japan Society for Fuzzy Theory, the IEEE Millennium Medal, the ACM 2001 Alien Newell Award, the Norbert Wiener Award of the Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society, other awards and seventeen honorary doctorates. He has published extensively on a wide variety of subjects relating to the conception, design and analysis of information/intelligent systems, and is serving on the editorial boards of over fifty journals.