James C. Bezdek
- Associated organizations
- University of West Florida
- Fields of study
- Pattern recognition
Biography
Dr. Bezdek is the Nystul Professor and Eminent Scholar of Computer Science at the University of West Florida in Pensacola. He developed the fuzzy c-means (FCM) algorithm, considered one of the most important discoveries in fuzzy pattern recognition and related areas and the clustering algorithm of choice for most practitioners in fuzzy exploratory data analysis. The original model has inspired many applications in related areas of pattern recognition and image processing.
Areas of research benefiting from Dr. Bezdek’s work include diagnostic medicine, economics, chemistry, image processing, meteorology, web mining, geology, target recognition, regression analysis, document retrieval, structural failure and irrigation models. One of the most notable applications has been in medical image analysis, where FCM segmentation of magnetic resonance images is used in conjunction with rule-based analysis for both diagnosis and pre-operative planning for brain tumor patients. Dr. Bezdek also has made pioneering contributions in deriving the theories for clustering of relational (Euclidean and non-Euclidean) data.
