Interview with George Lendaris, 2016: CIS Oral History Project

George G. Lendaris, Director of the NW Computational Intelligence Laboratory and the Director of the Systems Science Graduate Program, Portland State University, Life IEEE Fellow. 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 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.