5 Minutes with Prof. Bernadette Bouchon-Meunier

IEEE CIS Student Activities Subcommittee invites you to get to know the pioneers and experts in the Computational Intelligence. This month "5 minutes with..." focuses on pioneer Prof. Bernadette Bouchon-Meunier. What is your title, full name, and place of work? Dr. Bernadette Bouchon-Meunier, Director of Research Emeritus at the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research) - Sorbonne University, Paris, France What grade of member in CIS are you? Life Fellow How long have you been a member of CIS? I have been an IEEE member for 36 years and a CIS member since its inception. One reason why you are a member of CIS: I have been working on fuzzy and intelligent systems for more than 40 years and CIS is the best place to exchange information and meet specialists on these topics. What was your service pathway in the Computational Intelligence Society? I have been a member of the CIS Fuzzy Systems Technical Committee since 2003, chairing it in 2011-2012, I was elected a member of the CIS Adcom several times between 2004 and July 2014. I chaired the Women in Computational Intelligence Committee from 2004 to 2007 and I am still a member of this committee, happy to support women in our field. I chaired the IEEE France Section CIS chapter from 2007 to 2015. I was elected CIS Vice-President for Conferences in July 2014 and re-elected since then. Can you share with us one success story that will motivate young members and provide useful guidelines for their careers? My first research field was Information theory. In 1975, I worked on a cooperative project with a group of sociologists who were looking for a formal model for the questionnaires they used. I discovered Lotfi Zadeh’s seminal paper on fuzzy sets by chance, in the library of mathematics of the university. I was surprised to see that it matched my needs. It was the starting point of years of research based on fuzzy systems and also the first of a long list of multidisciplinary collaborations. Of course, documentary research is much easier now that we have all papers on line but it is also difficult because of the huge number of available documents. My recommendation would be not to have blinders on, to be curious, to collaborate with others. Mutidisciplinarity is enriching. Research out of your main stream may be fruitful. However, keep your own path and don’t get lost in the numerical world.