User:Futuristas/George Lendaris

Biography
George Lendaris received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1957, 1958, and 1961, respectively.

Scientific Contributions
Dr. Lendaris was the General Chair of the 1993 IJCNN; a member of the IEEE Neural Networks Council and, its successor, the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Adcom during 2001–2007; a member of the International Neural Network Society (INNS) Board of Governors during 1997–2000 and 2003–2009; President of INNS during 2000–2003; and Local Chair of the 2003 IJCNN. He developed the optical diffraction pattern sampling methods of pattern recognition and was declared “Father of Diffraction Pattern Sampling” by The International Society for Optical Engineers in 1977. After receiving the Ph.D. degree, he joined GM Defense Research Laboratories, where he did extensive work in control systems, neural networks, and pattern recognition. In 1969, he joined academia, first, at the Oregon Graduate Institute as a Faculty Chair and, two years later, at PSU as one of the founders and developers of its Systems Science Graduate Program, serving there for the past 36 years. While there, he expanded his academic and research activities into general system theory and practice and back again to computational intelligence, focusing, for the past ten years, on the development of the adaptive critic form of reinforcement learning and its application as an approximate dynamic programming methodology to optimal control systems design and, more recently, to context discernment and experience-based methods of optimal control. He has served a number of capacities at PSU, including President of the Faculty Senate, and has been active in neural network professional activities since the early 1990s.

Current post
He is currently the Director of the NWComputational Intelligence Laboratory and the Director of the Systems Science Graduate Program, Portland State University (PSU), Portland, OR.

When PSU began its SySc Program in late 1969, I had just begun as head of the Systems Science program at the nearby graduate institute known as the Oregon Graduate Institute (OGC). He was appointed to the Advisory Committee that crafted the plans for PSU's SySc Program, and that hired the Program's first Director, who was Dr. Harold Linstone. Two years later, Linstone invited me to join the PSU SySc Program, and given the financial difficulties being experienced at the OGC, the then Provost at OGC advised me to take the offer at PSU. He has been with the PSU SySc Program since 1971. Dr. Lendaris has played a key role in the Program's history.