Walter Banks
President
Byte Craft Limited
Waterloo, Ontario

Wednesday, May 14, 2008, 6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

Linguistic variables represent crisp information in a form and precision appropriate for the problem. For example, to answer the question "What is it like outside?" one might observe "It is warm outside." Experience has shown that if it is “warm” and the time is mid-day, a jacket is unnecessary, but if it is warm and early evening, it would be wise to take a jacket along (the day will change from warm to cool). These linguistic variables like “warm”, convey information about our environment or an object under observation.

We will show how linguistic variables can be defined and used in a variety of common applications, including home environment, product pricing, and process control. The use of linguistic variables in many applications reduces the overall computation complexity of the application. These linguistic variable manipulation rules are surprisingly easy to implement and have been shown to be particularly useful in complex non-linear applications. Linguistic variables are central to fuzzy logic manipulations, but are often ignored in the debates on the merits of fuzzy logic.

Walter Banks is the president of Byte Craft Limited, a Waterloo, Ontario company specializing in software development tools for embedded microprocessors. His interests include highly reliable system design, code generation technology, instruction set design, and programming language development and standards. Walter Banks is a member of the Canadian delegation to ISO WG-14, where he co-authored WDTR 18037 (a technical report on C language extensions to support embedded processors). He has co-authored one book, and numerous journal and conference papers.