Oral-History:Donald Kraft
About Donald Kraft
Dr. Donald H. Kraft (born 1943), is an IEEE Life Fellow, elevated to IEEE Fellow with the class of 2002 “for contributions to text retrieval via fuzzy set theory and genetic algorithms.” He is a member of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society and the IEEE Computer Society. Kraft is also a Fellow of the International Fuzzy Systems Association (2013) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2003) (AAAS) and a Distinguished Scientist (2008) in the Association for Computing Machinery.
Kraft received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in industrial engineering and his Ph.D. in industrial engineering (operations research) from Purdue University in 1965, 1966, and 1971, respectively. Kraft served as chair of computer science and is now professor emeritus, at Louisiana State University, Division of Computer Science and Engineering where he spent much of his career from 1976 to 2008. Since the early 1970s, Kraft has had an extensive experience in the application of computer methods to library science. His research, teaching, and publishing career has focused on bringing techniques from operations research, fuzzy logic, and genetic algorithms to information retrieval. He has co-authored five books and authored or co-authored twenty-one book chapters, thirty-three refereed scholarly journal articles, and forty-one refereed conference papers.
Kraft has also applied his interdisciplinary skills to volunteer work outside of academia including a range of professional and community activities, including serving as a coordinator and chair for science and engineering fairs, serving on policy committees, and volunteering for various religious and community organizations.
About the Interview
DONALD KRAFT: An interview Conducted by Gene Freeman, IEEE History Center, 14 November 2022.
Interview #886 for the IEEE History Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.
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Donald Kraft an oral history conducted in 2022 by Gene Freeman, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ USA.
Interview
INTERVIEWEE: Donald Kraft
INTERVIEWER: Gene Freeman
DATE: 14 November 2022
PLACE: Virtual
Freeman:
Today is November 14th, 2022. This is part of an oral history sponsored by IEEE History Center. It’s part of a project to record oral histories of IEEE Life Fellows.
I'm Gene Freeman. I'm an IEEE Life Member and chair of the Pikes Peak Chapter of the IEEE Computer Society. With me today is Dr. Donald H. Kraft, Professor Emeritus of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He’s also currently the adjunct professor at the Department of Computer Science at Colorado Technical University in Colorado Springs, Colorado. This session is recorded via IEEE Webex. Don, thanks for taking the time to be with us for this. I wanted to start at the beginning, talking a little bit about your family and early life. If you could state your name and the date and place of your birth.
Kraft:
Sure. Donald Harris Kraft. I was born December 21, 1943. I was originally born in South Sioux City, South Dakota and I was adopted at an early age and taken with my adoptive parents, who are really my real parents in my view, to Omaha, Nebraska where I grew up and was raised.
Freeman:
Talk a little about your parents, your father and mother, what kinds of things were they involved in?
Kraft:
My father, Hyman Kraft, was taken as an infant in the early 1900s from Avila, Russia, Minsk area and came to this country. My grandfather Sam Kraft started a company with other people to make furniture frames Omaha Parlor Frame Company. Then they would sell those to upholsterers. My mother Lillian Miller Kraft was an emigre from Liverpool, England. They met at a wedding in De Moines, [Iowa] where my mother was living at the time. They got married, and like I say, lived in Omaha all their lives.
I went to Omaha Central High School which is probably the biggest and one of the best, if not the best high school, in the State of Nebraska at that time. Then I did pretty well, graduating in 1961. Then I went to Purdue University where I majored in industrial engineering, graduating with a BSIE degree in 1965, a MSIE degree in 1966, and a Ph.D. in 1971.
Freeman:
Let me back you up a little bit. Do you have siblings?
Kraft:
Yes, I have, a sister, Sharon Kraft, six years younger than me.
Freeman:
Did she follow a similar path as you?
Kraft:
No, she didn’t really go to college. She got married and my brother-in-law took over the firm after my dad died. Then that went under eventually; markets changed.
Freeman:
Yes.
Kraft:
They soon got divorced, sadly. Then my sister moved to Georgia where she lives now.
Freeman:
Did your mother ever have a profession or was she primarily a homemaker?
Kraft:
No, no, just house maker. Both my parents had high school diplomas but not college.
Freeman:
Let’s talk about where you grew up and maybe talk a little about the area for those who might not know.
Kraft:
If you know the Omaha, Nebraska area, I grew up near Benson High School although I did not go to Benson. I went to Omaha Central, which was considered better, and a lot of my good friends went there so I followed suit. I was lucky enough to be able to take AP [Advanced Placement] classes my senior year: math and chemistry, which helped a lot when I went to college.
Freeman:
What kinds of things were you interested in when you were in grade school, junior high…?
Kraft:
Well, I always like math and technical things, so engineering was where I was going to go. Reading. I was involved with my synagogue and youth group and all of that which was fun.
Freeman:
Did you have hobbies while you were in school?
Kraft:
Reading, watching sports. My dad was an avid golfer and bowler, and I would go with him oftentimes to watch him. I tried my hand at golf, and I was terrible. I was a better bowler.
Freeman:
You mentioned math, technology, science, was there stuff going on that interested you at that time?
Kraft:
Oh, yes. We had a strong group of about twenty-five of us or so. We would take the Advance Placement chemistry and mathematics. I took beginning calculus in high school which was wonderful because it was a warm welcoming environment to learn a difficult subject. I did well at it. Surprisingly, for me, well.
Freeman:
You had mentioned a little earlier about engineering. Did you have a feeling that was something you would do, engineering, or did you think about it in terms of science?
Kraft:
Yes. I always assumed that I would be involved with my dad’s business, his furniture manufacturing business. But it turned out I really wasn’t that involved in it. I wasn’t that interested. I always felt I’d be a lousy manager. My dad got mad at me one time because he was having labor problems and I thought the labor unions were a good thing.
Freeman:
[Laughing]. When you were in high school, you mentioned AP Chemistry, you mentioned Math. Calculus. What subjects did you not like?
Kraft:
Well, there was nothing I really hated, but I wasn't that great in English. I guess, my only drawback was in English. I wasn't getting A’s; I was getting B’s.
Freeman:
But you had said you liked reading. Was it more fiction or nonfiction?
Kraft:
Mostly nonfiction.
Freeman:
Good.
Kraft:
I loved going with friends to the movies.
Freeman:
Did you like science fiction movies or…?
Kraft:
Yes, science fiction was good, but almost anything. It was just fun to go and be with friends and watch something and then talk about it afterward. Also, one of my good friends had a brother who lived in Kansas City, so we would truck down. Kansas City was the big city for us Omaha folks. We would go down there and try to pick up girls and go out on a date and then afterward we would go to a pancake place and have brunch at midnight.
Freeman:
[Laughing]. That’s great. You mentioned the movies, and I'm thinking about when you said you were born. You must have had radio when you were small. When did you finally get a television? Do you remember?
Kraft:
Well, we had a black and white TV, it’s got to be the late 1950s. If my memory serves.
Freeman:
Do you remember anything from that?
Kraft:
Oh, yes. I remember watching the news and things like Huntley Brinkley and other news shows. They were always short, fifteen or thirty-minute news shows. We had a small black and white TV. We had the rabbit ear antennas. The good old days.
Freeman:
Was the television reliable?
Kraft:
Yes.
Freeman:
Okay. I ask because, my parents had an old Zenith television and it seems like every time there was a show I wanted to watch, the tubes would go out. [Laughing] I’d go down and take the tubes out and go down to the drug store or whatever at that time. That’s how I got interested in electrical engineering, so I just wondered, but it sounds like you had a reliable television [Laughing].
Kraft:
Yes.
Freeman:
It’s great.
Kraft:
Yes. I can remember when I was in grad school and got married my parents bought us a color TV in 1969, which was interesting. I don’t recall the brand nor model. They had one for a while, and they just thought I had to have one.
Freeman:
Right, right. Oh, that’s great. When you were in high school what kind of hobbies did you have at that time?
Kraft:
One of the things I mentioned was watching sports. We had a really wonderful football team, and the famous Gayle Sayers was in my graduating class.
Freeman:
Oh, wow.
Kraft:
We were always competing for the state championship. Also, we had really sharp people at the top of my class. We were always champions of the state debate team, for example.
Freeman:
Great!
Kraft:
Just watching them and listening to them was always good.
Freeman:
Did you take part in the debate?
Kraft:
No. No. Just being an audience member when they would have debate contests.
Freeman:
What got you interested in going to college? Was that something you kind of assumed that you would be doing?
Kraft:
Yes, oh, yes. It was assumed that I would go to college. Like I say, I was thinking of getting in my father’s business initially when I was in high school. The field of engineering made sense to me.
Freeman:
Oh, okay. You said he made furniture.
Kraft:
Furniture frames. It would be like a couch or a chair. Then he would sell them to upholsterers who would upholster them and then sell them to retail places that would sell furniture.
Freeman:
That’s interesting. Why did you think about industrial as opposed to mechanical engineering?
Kraft:
I don’t know, it just seemed logical to me at the time.
Freeman:
Did you know any other industrial engineers?
Kraft:
No. No.
Freeman:
Oh.
Kraft:
My parents had not gone to college, so I was the first in my family (direct family, immediate family) to go to college.
Freeman:
Yes. Obviously, you said you had some interest in industrial engineering and that’s one that I think a lot of kids growing up may not even have known that much about.
Kraft:
I agree.
Freeman:
Did you look at the catalogs or how did you figure out what that was?
Kraft:
Just, like you said, I was looking at some college catalogs and I knew pretty well that I wanted to move a little bit away from home to be on my own, but not that far. Purdue was about 500-ish miles from Omaha, and I quickly settled on Purdue. It was really the only place I applied, and I got accepted.
Freeman:
Interesting. In the industrial engineering major were the beginning years generic in terms of math and science subjects before you got into the major?
Kraft:
Yes. You would take the beginning physics, beginning chemistry, calculus. I tested out of a year of calculus. I took a one-semester advanced chemistry course that if you passed it, you got a year’s credit. I did pass it, of course. There was drafting and I struggled in the drafting class, but that’s okay. Then I was in an advanced English course. That was tough, but I made it through.
It was interesting. When I first got to Purdue, we had a big seminar for introductory, for freshmen engineers and they called a bunch of our names including mine and we go into another room and the guy said congratulations, you’re in the engineering honors program. For the life of me I’d never heard of that, so I asked what that was. It turns out if you do well in all your classes, you become a junior after a year and a half which meant that, for example, you could have a car on campus since you’re now a junior.
Freeman:
Interesting.
Kraft:
The one bad thing is Purdue at that time, we’re talking about early 1960s, if you were an American male of the age eighteen to thirty-five or so, and if you were not 4F and you had not served, you automatically had to take ROTC [Reserve Officer Training Corp].
I took Air Force ROTC. At the beginning of my sophomore year, I thought about going advanced, but I have a serious defect in hearing. I wear hearing aids. Although at that time I wasn't wearing aids, but I knew I had a hearing problem, and they said no. They wouldn’t have me which I understand. You’ve got to be able to be physically fit in every area, so after a year and a half I was a junior and I was out of ROTC. I felt bad about it because I thought, okay, this will be a different career path. Let the Air Force pay for my graduate degrees and then I'll go do nice engineering things for the Air Force, serve my country, but it didn’t happen.
Freeman:
At what point did you begin to have industrial engineering in the curricula?
Kraft:
We started our sophomore year, second year, with an introduction to operations research, excuse me, to industrial engineering, forgive me. Talking about time and motion studies, human, factors. Time and motion studies, things of that sort.
Freeman:
You mentioned your dad’s business and you had some influence from that. When you saw that work did you think, oh, maybe we can build furniture more efficiently did you relate it to that?
Kraft:
Yes. At that time in my early undergraduate days, yes. I thought gee, all this stuff seems to apply.
Freeman:
Did you ever get to a point where you talked to your dad about that kind of thing?
Kraft:
Oh, yes. When I decided not to go into that, to go to grad school and then become a professor, he was somewhat disappointed.
Freeman:
You mean he wanted you to come to the business and bring the new ideas?
Kraft:
Yes. But I think he realized that I was not a great manager. That wasn't where my heart or head was.
Freeman:
Were there other people besides your dad that were kind of influencing your direction? High school teachers or college professors early on.
Kraft:
Yes. I thought that my senior year, my math teacher, my chemistry teacher we were very friendly with them and others in the advanced placement classes and, yes, they influenced us to go into technical areas and do what we could do.
Freeman:
Did some of your peers in high school who were also in Advanced Placement, did they end up going to Purdue also?
Kraft:
No. I was the only one at that time from that group who went to Purdue. But a lot of them went to either the University of Nebraska or one of the nearby schools or some of them went to Big Ten schools. Michigan especially comes to mind. A lot of them ended up as doctors or lawyers rather than engineers. My high school biology class, we had to dissect a frog and that killed any hope of a medical career for me.
Freeman:
Oh, did you not like doing it?
Kraft:
Oh no, it was terrible. I felt bad for the frog. What can I tell you [Laughing]?
Freeman:
Yes, I understand. Unfortunately, I had a teacher, and she didn’t quite know how to -- We were supposed to watch the heart beating and she was supposed to do something that would basically paralyze it, but she didn’t quite know how to do it, so I agree with you.
There anything going on in the world at the time you were getting into college that you mentioned, [for instance] trying military service, that kind of influenced your thinking in terms of your career.
Kraft:
Oh, yes. First, the whole civil rights movement. I was very sympathetic with that. I would get into arguments with my fellow students, and I remember one time one of the professors in the industrial engineering department came up to me and said, Don, do you really, believe what you’re saying. I said, yes, sir, I think I do. He said, well, then don’t stand here in the hall debating loudly with your fellow students, get back in your room and work out solutions. I thought, my God, that’s what I want to do.
Freeman:
Oh, that’s great.
Kraft:
I soon became interested during my senior year in operations research which then was a major part of industrial engineering. The trend was moving in that direction although some of the business schools started moving in that direction as well in the mid-1960s. I stayed at Purdue in grad school to get all my graduate work done and I became an operations researcher.
But I do remember an undergraduate program, I really enjoyed things like I took a class in circuits from the electrical engineering department and thermodynamics from the mechanical engineering department and I really enjoyed the idea of mathematical modeling and getting involved. I did pretty well, so I thought, gee, mathematical models are fun and then operations research; there you go.
Freeman:
Did you consider going to other universities for graduate school?
Kraft:
Yes, I thought so but at the time I was dating a girl who was going to go to law school in Indianapolis and I figured I should hang around.
Freeman:
Well, that’s a good reason.
Kraft:
As it turns out, she was a wonderful lady, but we just went our separate ways. To my knowledge she is now a retired lawyer of some renown in Indianapolis area.
Freeman:
When you were thinking about grad school, did you think about anything other than industrial engineering?
Kraft:
No. No. The professors I started to meet in industrial engineering who were doing operations research really impressed me, so I stayed, and I was happy I stayed. I don’t recommend necessarily to everybody to do that. It’s good to get a different flavor and go to different places that have different views of subjects. But none of the professors I had in grad school, did I have when I was an undergraduate, so I felt it was okay
Freeman:
You mentioned electronics, the circuits class. Did you find any specific undergraduate industrial engineering courses interesting?
Kraft:
Yes. There was one in production control. There was one in statistics. It was out of the math department but the statistics group, I enjoyed and thought this is interesting stuff, useful stuff.
Freeman:
Did you have any employment during college?
Kraft:
Yes, I would work, go back to Omaha and work in companies. A lot of them my father knew people and it was his influence if you would so I could get a summer job.
Freeman:
What kinds of jobs were they?
Kraft:
Well, mostly, nothing doing anything specific to industrial engineering. I just was a young kid, an undergraduate, so I worked in a company doing inventory stuff with a staple’s supplier. Staple guns and what have you have at a staple’s supplier. My dad was a customer, so we had an in there. Then I worked one summer for Bell Telephone which had a manufacturing place in Omaha. We were doing time and motion studies, so that was kind of in the industrial engineering.
Freeman:
Oh, yes. Yes. Interesting, yes. What other kinds of activities did you do while at college outside of engineering?
Kraft:
I was in the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity, and they demanded we do something. Because of a couple of my fraternity brothers were involved, I became a track manager. I would go to track meets and help out any way I could. Eventually, even though I have no athletic ability whatsoever, I lettered because I was a manager. I got a lettered jacket. My letter said Big P and it said manager on it, so nobody would have mistaken me for an athlete, but it was kind of nice.
Freeman:
Was track an interesting sport to you or was it just one they said you might want to do?
Kraft:
Yes, it was interesting talking to the athletes. One of the nicest things, many of the track athletes were African American. This is back in the early 1960s and some of them were in a fraternity. They didn’t have a house. They lived in a dorm together. We organized a joint party, and they brought some records. We had an old-style jukebox and we put their records in the jukebox and played and danced and it was just a fun time. It was kind of unique having basically an all-white Jewish fraternity and all black fraternity and we just had fun. It was a nice evening.
Freeman:
Great.
Kraft:
We made some headway in the civil rights movement at Purdue.
Freeman:
Yes. Well, it’s very good. Were you a student member of any engineering societies at that point?
Kraft:
I eventually became [a member of] the industrial engineering honor fraternity, Alpha Pi Mu. I was a member of Sigma [Xi] which is a [scientific] research honorary [society]that I became eventually involved with. I'm trying to remember my Greek alphabet
Freeman:
When you were working on your master’s, was there a certain output? With some masters, you do a paper or a set of experiments or what?
Kraft:
Yes. A lot of us were pushed to do a thesis. I did a project. I was involved with a sociology professor, so I worked with him. He was very involved with interesting professional societies and talking about people’s perceptions of what is a society and what makes an engineering society a society. He had some data and I helped him analyze that statistically.
That was the old way of dealing with computers, the old unit record equipment, where you take a board and if you’re going to sort or calculate things, you wire the board and then use it and then run your cards through it. Those were the good old days of computing. Or the old the desk calculators, they used to vibrate as they did the calculation.
Freeman:
You are saying basically, the wiring you were doing was essentially the programming?
Kraft:
Yes. Absolutely.
Freeman:
What kinds of unit, who made these?
Kraft:
Unit record equipment, IBM [International Business Machine] or whatever. Like if you wanted to sort data in it you had the punch cards coming in, you could, wire it for which fields you were interested in.
Freeman:
Okay.
Kraft:
But you’re talking about the late 1960s now.
Freeman:
Right, right. So, essentially it was a card reader.
Kraft:
In effect, but it also dictated how you were going to sort the data.
Freeman:
Okay, it read it and did sorting but there was no software
Kraft:
Yes. No coding per se.
Freeman:
No coding per se. Interesting.
Kraft:
I did take a course in computing that taught me Fortran II and a basic low-level assembler and that kind of interested me in computing. Then it was funny because when I was a grad student, suddenly, I was using Fortran IV and I wondered what happened to Fortran III. Now you wouldn’t recognize it from the modern languages.
Freeman:
Where did you run your Fortran decks then?
Kraft:
Oh. Purdue had a computer center. You would bring your deck to the computer center, and you would put it in a box with a rubber band around it. Then a couple of hours later, they would run your program onto a tape and then take the tape to the computer and process it. And of course, I was running Fortran and then you’d come back and get your output. Just hope that number one, you didn’t have any syntax errors and hopefully, two: that it worked. If it didn’t, you tried to fix it and go through the process again.
Freeman:
What was the turnaround time from when you turned in a deck to when they gave you an output?
Kraft:
A couple of hours.
Freeman:
A couple of hours.
Kraft:
Two, three hours usually.
Freeman:
Yes.
Kraft:
They had a thing called PUFFT (Purdue University Fast Fortran Translator).
Freeman:
What did you think about programming after you were done with the rewiring of the board?
Kraft:
Oh, it was so much better. So much easier to work with.
Freeman:
Did you enjoy the process?
Kraft:
Yes. When it came to programming the algorithms I generated for my doctoral dissertation, it was just so much better to run the programs and see [the output]. By then you could do it remotely. They had timesharing.
Freeman:
Right.
Kraft:
You’d go to a terminal and run your program and instantly get a response.
Freeman:
Were you using cards at that point?
Kraft:
Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Punch cards. My dissertation was done on punch cards and my algorithm.
Freeman:
Okay. So, moving into that, did you go directly from your master’s and starting to work on your doctoral program?
Kraft:
Yes, sir. At that time my, my major professor who had not yet left for Georgia Tech, Norm Baker, and the department chairman Ferdinand Leimkuhler, got a grant to study operations research in libraries. That got my interest in libraries and eventually in information retrieval. My dissertation was involving journal selection so either the library should buy the journal or not. But I'm not claiming it was all that useful but what I am saying is that it gave me a chance to get into zero/one linear programming.
The problem with what the optimization there is that it’s more complicated because you cannot take a derivative. I would bring like constraints of budget and time into the objective function formula, Lagrangian function but I can’t take it or use Kuhn- Tucker conditions to take a derivative because zero/one is not continuous. I got involved with some other ideas. It worked.
Freeman:
We probably need to back up on that one. You suddenly took off into [Laughing] some mathematical, broader mathematical concepts.
Kraft:
Yes.
Freeman:
Why don’t you give a layman’s version of what you just said? [Laughing]
Kraft:
Okay. You have decisions and in this case: which journals to buy or not to buy, so it’s zero or one. You can have an objective function like the merit of each of the journals and you want to maximize that merit. In addition, you have constraints. Oh, you can say buy everything because everything has some merit, but you have budget and storage constraints. If you buy it, then you’re sort of obligated. Libraries feel obligated to maintain the subscription for as long as they can. I took the constraints that are also functions of whether or not you buy the journal and I weight my constraints and put the whole thing as an objective function. This is what I want to maximize. The problem is you can’t take derivatives because your variables are zero or one. They’re not continuous. Calculus doesn’t apply, so I tried other things. Eventually, I came up with some methods that would not guarantee me the ultimate solution, but I can guarantee you a good one.
Freeman:
It’s a good thing, yes.
Kraft:
I cannot prove it. My solution is optimal.
Freeman:
Yes. Yes. So, knowing something about your later work, obviously here we’re getting into things as you just said that aren’t black and white, that aren’t one and zero.
Kraft:
Sure.
Freeman:
Some of your later interests in fuzzy logic and things like that, obviously, probability and…
Kraft:
Right. Well, when I finished my degree, I went to the University of Maryland in their information science school; the library school if you would. They thought it was interesting to hire somebody without a library degree that might come in and come up with some unusual ideas. There I got very interested in information retrieval. I got involved with the American Society for Information Science which was what it was called then. Information retrieval just sort of fell in. You start thinking about and sort of zero/one is it a given article relevant or not. Even now if you go to the website and you do a search and you say is it relevant or not, and relevance is an interesting, an imprecise concept to say the least.
In 1975 I spent a year at Berkeley. I got involved with Lofti Zadeh who was in computer science at the time. He started out as an electrical engineering and control theory. If you know about Z transforms, Zadeh, Zadeh, that’s where the Z comes from, his name, Lofti Zadeh.
Freeman:
Oh, really?
Kraft:
Yes.
Freeman:
I didn’t know that either.
Kraft:
I did not know that but, I was told by colleagues that that was his. But anyway. He came up with the idea of fuzzy sets and the whole -- now fuzzy sets is the whole idea. And what is really kind of neat is if you say get me a list of all the people who are Life Members of IEEE right now, well, you and I would be in and my wife would not be in the set.
Freeman:
Right.
Kraft:
By the way she was a librarian when I met her and married her. So that reinforced my interest in libraries. The whole idea is, it’s pretty clear, you’re in or you’re out. But what if I said to you: get me a list of all the IEEE members whether they’re life members or regular members or what, but get me all the members who are tall. Even if you know their height, that’s an imprecise concept. If you say, well, gee, I'm 6 foot (I'm 5 foot 9), but if I say, Gene, if you were, say, 6 foot 2, and you say I'm tall, yes, maybe, but if you were playing basketball against, LeBron James, I’d pity you
Freeman:
[Laughing].
Kraft:
He is 7 foot 1 or so. The whole idea is that tall was relative. And do you really mean that if you’re 5 foot 11.999 inches, you’re not tall? If you’re 6 foot you are? Are you really that precise that you can draw that hard line? Fuzzy set says how about strength of membership, not a probability but a strength of membership in the set. If someone is 5 foot 2, you’d say they’re pretty low in strength of membership in the tall set, but if you’re 7 foot, you’re pretty much high membership in that set. So that’s the whole idea of fuzzy sets. The whole idea of relevance of a document could be imprecise and lead to fuzzy sets. That’s how I got involved with it.
Freeman:
Was Maryland your first job after you got your doctorate?
Kraft:
Yes. Yes. I worked at the University of Maryland for five years. Then Berkeley had an opening. A professor I’d gotten to know was on sabbatical and so I was his “substitute” for the year. I went there and I met Zadeh and really enjoyed it. I was fairly productive getting some papers out while I was there which I think is the environment of Berkeley. Then Louisiana State University. I met a guy when I was at Maryland who was in the business school who the computer science department hired at LSU. I ran into him at a meeting, and he said, Don, how would you like to come to LSU. They made me an offer I couldn't refuse. So I went to LSU, and who knew, thirty years later, I’ve retired, and I came to Colorado.
Freeman:
At the point you left Maryland, what kinds of things had you done during your five years there? Because obviously it was beginning of a lot of ideas that were going to continue throughout your career. What did you kind of leave them with?
Kraft:
I was lucky enough to get a small grant from the National Library of Medicine to work on seeing if the evaluation of journals could be (that was part of my journal selection) lived on the idea that journals have a benefit, a merit, and we looked at usage.
Freeman:
Right.
Kraft:
We looked at journals that would be cited or journals that would be left on desks. You’d pull the journal out, read an article, and then put the journal -- just leave it on your workspace. We just look at usages as a benefit. That was kind of fun to play with and try to mathematically model. But my real love was -- a couple of students there and we got involved some more modeling for like when you remove journals from a library. When they’ve outlived their usefulness. I had a couple of students who wanted to play with that. I love the idea of getting students involved in research and working with them. We got some articles on doing that. There was a big debate: the normal evaluation and retrieval is recall imprecision. Recall. Of all the articles out there, what fraction are relevant? And then the second one is precision. Of all the articles out there, which ones did I give you of the relevant ones?
Kraft:
Of course, the trivial answer is if you want 100 per cent recall, take everything. Because then you’ll never miss anything. But precision goes out the door. If you want total precision, get nothing, 'cause then you’ll never get any bad ones.
Freeman:
Yes.
Kraft:
But of course, those are the obvious total out of bounds policies. But the whole idea is look at what I gave you, what fraction of the relevant ones did I give you, what fraction of what I gave you is relevant? Balance those two. I got involved with trying to balance those two.
Freeman:
Did you or your group end up developing software for this? Or you worked out the kind of theoretical basis?
Kraft:
It’s just theoretical and write a paper.
Freeman:
Okay.
Kraft:
My old joke was I'm a professor, I don’t have to worry about application.
Freeman:
It was interesting because I listened to this interview with Zadeh. Is that how you say his name, Professor Zadeh?
Kraft:
Lofti Zadeh. Yes.
Freeman:
That’s essentially what he said, what you just said, because they were asking him about a more precise applications and he said he didn’t really get involved with that. Some of those things have evolved in academia over the years but at that time I think he said you really didn’t want to interfere with the creativity of -- the professor or the grad student and their concepts that they were developing.
Kraft:
Yes. Yes. One sad thing is people in the artificial intelligence community for a long time rejected fuzzy sets and were fairly critical of Zadeh. He just had the nicest personality. He would never take offense or give offense. He would just simply say there are applications. And by the way there for a while back in the I’d say mid to late 1990s, people, especially the Japanese, started coming up with actual applications. I even have a fuzzy rice cooker and the idea is fuzzy logic is used to determine the temperature and the length of cooking to make your rice nice.
Freeman:
So how does it work?
Kraft:
Yes. Yes, it works, makes nice rice. My running joke is if the rice is fuzzy though, don’t eat it. The cooker lets you set the amount of rice and how you want it (fluffy or sticky) and it determines the temperature and cooking time.
Freeman:
[Laughing].
Kraft:
They’ve come up with other fuzzy appliances that use fuzzy logic as part of the control mechanism. It makes a lot of sense. When you see applications, for example, I saw an article about a robot and the idea of having rules, so you say if the robot is moving in a direction and there’s a block up ahead, veer slightly left to go around the block. That’s fine. Now, if you veer too much, you’re going to not get to your goal. If you don’t veer enough, you’re going to bump into the block. So, you could easily see where this could be extended like say to driverless cars. The whole idea then is it’s imprecise and therefore fuzzy logic makes sense.
Freeman:
Yes, Zadeh said that part of what seemed to bother people was the name because obviously conceptually a lot of these ideas now are being used all over
Kraft:
Oh, yes. The other thing by the way, the opposite of fuzzy has been known as crisp. Again, the set of who is a life member in IEEE, you and I are, my wife is not. That’d be a crisp set because you’re either in or you’re out. There is no imprecision at all. I had a friend who said he thought that the opposite of fuzzy should be bald which I took exception to.
Freeman:
[Laughing].
Kraft:
I resemble that remark.
Freeman:
Yes, you and me both. It sounds like Maryland had some very good things. Was it that you had another opportunity that came up?
Kraft:
Yes.
Freeman:
The Berkeley opportunity?
Kraft:
Berkeley was just a visiting professorship. In fact, Berkeley is an interesting place. I got an email from the dean who had it from the provost that said: tell your visiting faculty they are really visiting, May is coming, they have to go away. I'm thinking to myself: you’re going to stop paying me in May. This is an expensive area in the world to live, of course I'm going. I was lucky enough that I can go back to Maryland, but LSU made a nice offer and it sounded like a fun thing to do and it was in computer science and that sounded fascinating. The one thing I love is my boss said to me, Don, I know you’re not coming from a computer science background. By the way he was a physical chemist by degree. He said just keep doing your research, do a lot of it and do it well and you’ll have a nice career. It worked out nicely for me.
Freeman:
Obviously, when you started out your career in industrial engineering, I don’t think they had a computer science curriculum.
Kraft:
[No, actually], Purdue claims that in the mid-1960s, they were the first department ever to be called computer science. That’s their claim. So, yes, there was a computer science discipline there on the campus. Like I say, I had taken one course that industrial engineering taught in Fortran II and in small assembly language. It was fine. I was very happy that my background made me curious enough that when I got to LSU I could learn, what I didn’t know and just go right along with it. It worked out well for me. I was able to publish and do well. I very was happy. I would say to anybody who was going into the business, whether it’s in electrical engineering, whether it’s in industrial engineering or computer science, get involved with the organizations. I was happy to be involved. I’ve chaired a number of conferences, mostly in New Orleans, because people think New Orleans is a fun city to have a conference in and it is.
The Association for Computing Machinery, Special Interest Group in Information Retrieval. A conference on knowledge management. ACM is involved with that. I ran it in New Orleans. I was involved with the Fuzzy IEEE conference that we started where IEEE sponsored it. Fuzzy Sets Conference. Now, there are other conferences in fuzzy sets but at least I’ve been involved with a group. Even being a program committee chair or a programing committee member. I just said it’s easy to get involved, just volunteer. So do publish. But also get involved in your profession. But Gene, you are really involved with IEEE doing things for the society and that’s fantastic.
Freeman:
Yes, but it happened more after I retired. Anyway, if we go back to computer science work, were you involved with the Department of Computer Science at Berkeley or was that when you went back?
Kraft:
No, no. Outside of going over and meeting Zadeh and a few of his colleagues and having him come over and they give a talk, I was in this school of what then was called Librarianship, now it’s the School of Information Science.
Freeman:
Oh, really?
Kraft:
Yes.
Freeman:
Interesting. Now when you went to LSU, the first position you had, what department was that in?
Kraft:
Computer science.
Freeman:
Oh, it was. So, that was your first computer science position --
Kraft:
Computer Science Department, yes.
Freeman:
Oh. You ended up shaping that department over time.
Kraft:
Yes. Well, I was involved. We had a really good textbook, so I was teaching assembly language, then PL-1, and then Fortran. When you were a kid, you learned English. If you suddenly found yourself in France and you’re going to try to speak French, at least you understand the details of language. What is a subject? What is an object? What is a noun? What is a verb, and so forth? It makes it easy to learn other languages. If you know, say, Fortran, then it’s not that hard to figure out PL-1. It’s just a little bit different syntax and a little bit different capability than COBOL I even taught COBOL for a semester or two. Well, it was not that bad. Eventually, I started teaching other things, programming languages, database management. I always thought the best way to learn a subject is teach it.
Freeman:
When you went to LSU what year was that?
Kraft:
1975. Check that, 1976, forgive me.
Freeman:
That’s when you went to LSU. Wow. You saw quite an evolution in hardware in the time you were there.
Kraft:
Oh, absolutely.
Freeman:
When you went there, did they have minicomputers or were they still mostly mainframes?
Kraft:
No. We were all mainframes. Then we got involved with a VAX for our department and then of course got into laptops.
Freeman:
When do you remember the laptops coming in? Do you recall?
Kraft:
It had to be in the mid to late-1980s.
Freeman:
Okay. Were they IBM type or Apple type or?
Kraft:
No, not Apple. It was PCs. I hate to say this, I don’t remember the brands.
Freeman:
It sounds like it would be IBM compatible.
Kraft:
Actually, it wasn’t that. It wasn't so much laptops as it was desktops. They were bigger.
Freeman:
Yes, it was IBM compatibles, I suspect.
Kraft:
Yes, absolutely.
Freeman:
Yes, that’s interesting. Yes. I was just thinking about what’s significant. Of course, you were dealing with the evolution of library science, but you got to develop your ideas as the hardware kept developing.
Kraft:
Oh, yes. With that I mean I can remember my first desktop was a Gateway machine. I think it had something like 256 megabytes of RAM. No, smaller than that; 64 and maybe 256 megabytes of hard drive. You’d have to pay big money to get someone to custom-make something that small for you today.
Freeman:
Oh, yes.
Kraft:
But it worked.
Freeman:
Oh, yes [Laughing].
Kraft:
I remember there were a couple of games. Every time I learned a new command and figured out how to make the computer do something, I would allow myself to play one of the games.
[Short break in video session.]
Freeman:
We are back.
Kraft:
A couple of things I just wanted to throw in.
Freeman:
Sure.
Kraft:
After about several years at LSU, maybe six or seven years or so, I had joined the Computer Society of IEEE and enjoyed that membership. The chairman, Walt Rudd, and a colleague, S.S. Iyengar, came up to me and said, Don, it’s time you became a senior member of IEEE, so, we got a few people to recommend me, we applied, and I got the most wonderful letter from IEEE you can imagine. It said: Dear Don, congratulations, you deserve to be a Senior Member of IEEE, but we have a little problem. You joined the Computer Society, but to be a senior member of IEEE, you must be a member of IEEE. So, I had to not only join the Computer Society, but join the IEEE itself which I have kept up to this day.
I thought it was a fascinating look into being involved. I became associate editor of the IEEE Transactions of Fuzzy Systems in the mid-1990s. I did that for about five, six years. Someone suggested I go for Fellow of IEEE, and I applied. Eventually, I made it based on my research, but also being involved with conferences and the journal and what have you. Like I say, getting involved has its own rewards. I got to meet some great people.
[Editorial note: You are nominated to become a Fellow of IEEE by other IEEE Fellows.]
Freeman:
When it comes people who are key historical figures, such as yourself, we talk about Zadeh, but who were some of the others? What projects did they work on? Who served on committees? Does anyone stand out in your mind?
Kraft:
There’s a fellow, getting involved with fuzzy sets, Jim Bezdek. A couple of people from the University of Missouri that I got involved with. Oh, just meeting them at conferences and you get international. Like one of the nice things was we had a conference in Budapest in fuzzy systems. After the conference, some of us got to go on a tour of the country of Hungary which was kind of fun. That was like around 1990. You just get to meet various people and that’s where you get ideas for research because someone would suggest have you thought about this or would you like to collaborate on that. Just learn to say yes.
Freeman:
I know one of the areas you’ve been very influential is in library science. What kinds of changes in the time you worked in library science did you see come about during your career?
Kraft:
Well, it was started in the early 1960s when I was still a student, but it was the computerization of the catalog. Then what happened is one of the big breakthroughs and again I wasn't involved in any of this was that people noticed that if you would write a book, you’d want to copyright it. The Copyright Office is part of the Library of Congress. You would send the book to the Library of Congress, they would add it to their collection, and then they would issue the copyright for them. It dawned on people there that they could take the cataloging information, the author, the title, the subject matter, the year of publication, the publisher, and other information, and computerize it.
One fellow in Ohio formed a company, it was called the Ohio College Library Center, which now is just called OCLC. First of all, they basically generated catalog cards so you could buy your cards from them. They would get the data from the Library of Congress and then they would put it in their system and then you would say I’d want this book and they would generate the cards and send them to you. Now of course it’s all online. That’s the next step. Catalogs are now online. You go into a library, and you will see computer terminals and you can log into the catalog and say what do you have on a given subject. Or what do you have on electrical circuits design. Or what do you have on, power. Which of course is another part of electrical engineering. [And you] find what they have. Or you could look for a given author. What do you have by Eugene Freeman? See what’s there. Or Donald Kraft for that matter. So, that is one major thing. Then people expanded that in the libraries to other functions like circulation. You would have the catalog and you check out a book, so they have your information and the book connected. Then there’s a time limit, so they can write you a note and say please return the book or pay a fine or… because libraries have gone away from fines pretty much. Then when you check it back in, it’s there or if it’s lost, they can deal with it. Here comes another book, but it’s a second edition, so we can update our catalog and maybe get rid of the first edition if we want to and just have the second edition or whatever the library wants to do.
Freeman:
A lot of the things you just described, those would be, more of a database type entry, right?
Kraft:
Absolutely.
Freeman:
Would you be looking for information on a subject, but you’re not exactly sure what it is you want? That would be one of those more difficult problems that you were working on.
Kraft:
Correct. The next rise was generating search engines for the web when the web came about. Of course, the big one today is Google, but there were others. including Yahoo, AltaVista, and others even having browsers. I can remember the old days: Mosaic was one of the browsers. Now most of us use Chrome or Echo or Internet Explorer as our web browsers.
Then we want to search the web. And you even now have companies that do what’s called SEO, Search Engine Optimization. So, Gene, you’re going to go into business, and you want to sell a product and you want it listed and you want it listed high when people search for that product because if you’re 300th in the list, most users won’t go down that far. You’d like to be in the top. How do you design your site and how do you make your site pleasant to the user? Color and design. There are all kinds of things that people have gotten involved with.
Freeman:
When you were running some of these conferences, were these topics just starting to emerge? Did you get papers on some of these topics?
Kraft:
Yes, absolutely. One of the other things is that I became most proud of is I became editor of the Journal of the Association of Information Science which soon changed its name to add Technology. Now it’s the Journal of the Association of Information Science and Technology. I was editor of that journal for twenty-four years.
When I started out, we came out six times a year and we were stapled with a very thin, two, three, four articles in the journal. Now we are international in scope, and we come out twelve times a year. We have a spine and there are like 2,300, 2,400 pages every year of the journal. I must have helped that because we had people from all over the world come and publish in that journal. [Reflecting the international scope], they changed the name from the American Society for Information Science and Technology to the Association for Information Science and Technology. They keep the ASISC acronym, but they dropped the American because we really are, if you look at the journal, we’re totally international. People all over the world, including Americans of course, publish in the journal. I'm very proud of that.
Freeman:
Yes, I went to the website and you’re the Emeritus Editor of it.
Kraft:
Yes. I don’t know why. After I was retired, and that’s fine for doing that for twenty-four years, my god, they kept telling me that they really need to find more people, new people. You know, ten years is enough. I said, fine, go find more people. They kept being unhappy with who they found, but finally they found someone who did a really good and they said, Don, you’re now Editor Emeritus. They just kept it up. I'm surprised I'm still called that, but I'm not going to argue.
Freeman:
Yes, but to me the value of the oral histories right now is so many of the people that are in your age group that have been involved in computers. You saw the fundamental transitions, right? There will be things in the future, but you started out with the punch cards, and you went to the Web. That’s quite [an accomplishment].
Kraft:
Yes, well even with my journal.
Freeman:
It’s amazing.
Kraft:
When I started out people would send me three copies of their article to be submitted to the journal. I had a little form, and I would send that form and the article to referees. I used the mail system put it in the mail. I send it to this one or that one. Then I have to send an email nagging, hey, where’s my review. Then I get the reviews. I send them to the author, again by mail. They send me a revised draft and that goes back to the referees. Now it’s all automatic. It’s electronic.
Freeman:
Yes, and I guess that’s what enables you. Not only is there more information, but that’s what enables you to publish so many more articles right?
Kraft:
Yes. One of the nice things is if you’re a member of the society, you will get notices of articles that are coming out in the journal soon and you can go to the society’s digital library. And as a member you can look, or if you’re not a member you have to pay a few bucks to get the article. You can look, even in advance of the actual publication. The only thing they say is that if you look at it, don’t disseminate it. And cite it as a journal article, not as something you saw on the Web.
Freeman:
Right. Of the many articles that you did, are there any off the top of your head, that were cited frequently or certainly were very influential? You did some yourself and some with colleagues.
Kraft:
Well one of them that I was proud of that I worked with a colleague who was back then at the University of Chicago, and we were looking at recall imprecision. If you and I looked at it and compared it to statistical testing, I said if you look at this, you’re really in an optimization and you’re trying to -- it turns out you’re maximizing recall which is one minus alpha errors in statistical testing. Excuse me, one minus, beta which is a type two error in statistical testing subject to a restriction on alpha, the type one error. It just relates very closely to statistical testing. I thought that was kind of interesting. I’m very proud of that work. That has been cited pretty well. That’s the one article that comes to mind that I'm really super proud of.
Freeman:
Do you remember where that was published?
Kraft:
I wasn’t editor then but in the Journal of American Society for Information Science.
Freeman:
That’s great. How about conferences? Again, you chaired many conferences. Were there some that stand out? For example, at this conference so and so spoke and this turned out to be prophetic or maybe they were all that way, I don’t know.
Kraft:
I was very happy with the two ACM SIG IR [Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval] conferences. Although one stands out for a bad reason. It was on September 11th, 2001, we had a SIG IR conference in New Orleans.
Freeman:
Wow.
Kraft:
Of course, that’s 9/11. The Tuesday that the towers were hit and collapsed, we brought in speakers to the banquet. We couldn't get a TV hookup fast enough. We wanted to hear President Bush’s speech to the nation. Then I was asked are we going to call off the conference. I said, no, for three reasons. One, you can’t get out of here.
Freeman:
Yes.
Kraft:
Even if you could find or rent a car, a bus, a train, or something, say to Los Angeles, I got people from New Zealand, what are they going to do, swim backstroke over the Pacific? Come on. I said you’re stuck here. Secondly, we can help each other. We can still go on with the conference. We can room together because the price of the hotel was -- I had grad students who were worried about the price of the hotel and food and all that. The hotel was great because they knew no one was coming in, so they said three, four, five of you can room together in a room. We’re bringing in cots and you’ll divide the cost of the room among you so it will be reasonable. We can help each other. Thirdly, I said, I'll be damned if the bastards who did this get a cheap victory on my watch. They seemed aghast at my language, but they were lucky I said it that nicely. I was livid at what happened to our country. I wasn’t he only one, mind you.
Freeman:
Yes, I was looking, and I saw when you had that conference and I thought -- and I couldn't tell if you had run the event but, yes.
Kraft:
Oh, yes. We had the first Fuzzy IEEE conference was in San Diego. I was a session chair. The session involved fuzzy databases except two Italian women were there and they were doing fuzzy information retrieval. Of course, I perked up at that. We went out to lunch and since then we’ve published several articles together.
Freeman:
A little different topic. You’ve been part of many, many professional organizations and we talked about IEEE and ACM. It seems like there’s been a struggle of professional organizations establishing their relevance in today’s society. Both ACM and IEEE struggle with that. This may be more in industry than it is in academia, but that’s my perspective from industry.
You’ve been part of so many societies and they’ve done very important work, I wonder what your thoughts are for some of the younger people. Now in some geographies, in Asia, there’s a lot of interest in these societies because I think there’s a value and understanding the importance of reputation and establishing credentials. In the U.S. maybe not so much. I wondered what your thoughts are on that.
Kraft:
Yes. First of all, I think, ASISC, just like others, AMC or IEEE, but in a different profession struggles with the idea of do you focus on the practitioner or on the academic.
I’ve had people who’ve said to me virtually your journal is unreadable. There's mathematics in it and such. I said, yes, of course. I said, look, first of all you made an engineer/ operations researcher your editor, now turned computer scientist. By the way I’ve always said I went to the dark side, computer science, but the bottom line is you took this character and made him your editor. Of course, I'm not going to shy away from math. I just hope I can get authors to explain it so the layman can understand it a little or the practitioner can understand. And even if you don’t follow all the mathematical derivatives at least understand here’s the problem, here’s the solution, and even if the method is magic, fine, it’s magic, but realize what they’re saying. So hopefully we do but it’s a struggle, there’s no question of it.
When you become international it even gets more interesting because some of the wonderful people internationally are not the best speakers or writers should I say of the Queen’s English. I should say King’s English now. So, there’s that. But people have gotten involved. By the way, the one thing I dearly love is to go to a computer conference. I could go to an IEEE conference, and you have a speaker and well-renowned speaker and they’re having trouble getting the computer to show their PowerPoint slides.
Freeman:
[Laughing].
Kraft:
You know you’re sitting there, and I just love it. By the way I'm one of them. I won’t claim I’m at their level, but I'm one of them that says, oh, how do I do this and then you have some student come up and say, here, click this.
Freeman:
Yes, yes. No, this is true. But as you say, the conferences are particularly important. There’s a value of the professional association. For example, you were part of the American Association for Advancement of Science and so many different organizations, were there best practices you saw in some associations that you could see other associations maybe wanting to emulate?
Kraft:
Well, I love the idea of becoming a life member. After so many years, you don’t have to pay dues anymore and you are part of a group of “elder statesmen” who have -- I mean, this is why I'm here to hopefully impart some semblance of wisdom that younger people can look at and say, yes.
Freeman:
Sure.
Kraft:
I think there’s that. In fact, I just heard that ASISC Society is going to the concept of life membership. IEEE has taught the world something important. I don’t think ACM does that. Maybe they will. But it is a great thing.
Freeman:
They do have something. Yes, they do have something related, but we definitely do.
Kraft:
IEEE has a fellow program and I'm lucky enough to be a fellow. ASISC doesn’t call it fellow, but I just became one of the distinguished members.
Again, IEEE has shown the world something. By the way I have told people getting their Ph.D. or whatever, I said look, when you get your Ph.D., I don’t care whether you’re going to industry, you’re going to academics, you’re going to go into consulting, whatever you’re doing. First, don’t waste it. Publish off your dissertation. It’s not that hard. Just rewrite it up as a journal article. Number two, don’t just do journals, go to conferences. Meet the people you cited, the people that taught you. Number three, go up and meet Zadeh, go up and meet in fuzzy sets. Go up and meet a Jim Bezdek in computer science. If you have the chance, go meet the guy who started the internet, go meet the guy who, started the laptop industry.
Steve Jobs passed away but that would be a great one, I would have loved to meet someone like that. But meet them and talk to them. Talk about your interest. Most of them are nice guys who will be glad to listen to you and maybe give you ideas for future work. Maybe even a collaboration of one sort of another.
Get involved. Yes, I’ll referee a paper for you. Yes, I'll be on the committee for the next meeting or what have you. Just knowing as a volunteer in 1990 I got a call from some people who wanted the simulation conference to be in New Orleans. They didn’t know anybody in Louisiana that did simulation, but they knew I was there, so they asked me would I be local arrangements chairman and I did that. In fact, I was told that people got mad at me because we had such good receptions. People ate so well that they had to go on diets. Worse than that, when they went after they were going to go to the French Quarter and have dinner, they weren’t hungry anymore.
Freeman:
[Laughing].
Kraft:
I had a rule. I said I don’t care if we can’t afford baby shrimp, if we will have shrimp in the jambalaya or the gumbo but we will have good food and plenty of it and we will not run out of the food. You know if you come twenty minutes late, there’ll be plenty of food still there waiting for you. It worked.
Freeman:
You’re making me hungry now. Another area I wanted to touch on is you’ve obviously worked with many, many, many students and advised them in their careers. Are there some of your students that stand out in your mind?
Kraft:
Yes, one especially. When I was heavily involved in the doctoral program at Colorado Tech, a young lady, Erin Colvin, worked with me. She got involved and was interested in software reuse. But software reuse, there is a retrieval aspect. If you say you have a problem and you say, gee, I think there’s some software out there, either I wrote it or someone else wrote it, I wonder if I get a hold of it and modify it, perhaps, if need be, to help solve my problem. There’s a retrieval aspect of finding the software. That’s called software reuse. She wanted to apply fuzzy retrieval ideas to it, and it was the first time I’ve ever seen fuzzy, retrieval actually confronted with data. If you have a UNIX operating system, there is a set of, (you can get it with a man command) and you can get a manual that explains what each command does. If you say what does MV do: it moves files. But the idea is you can retrieve that. That was her base to retrieve. She showed that fuzzy retrieval did better than, some classical work that had been done by other people using that same database. That’s why I thought it was a good comparison. It was the first time fuzzy was ever compared to other retrieval, methods. I was happy to see we did okay.
Freeman:
This part of her doctoral work?
Kraft:
Yes, she got her Ph.D. We had published an article, a conference proceeding, a book chapter, and a book on the work that we did together.
Freeman:
Wow. Wow. So where is she now?
Kraft:
Erin Colvin. Her husband was a Navy pilot. Then they moved to the D.C. area. I think she works for MITRE, one of the industry players involved with the military.
Freeman:
Gee, that’s interesting. Very good.
Kraft:
That stands out very much in my mind. There were some master’s students at Maryland that we published some work with. They just came up with ideas from classes I taught. They said, hey, what do you think of this article? I had commented about it, and they said, well, I had you as an author and I said, yes, but I'm the last author because you guys did the work.
In fact, there’s an old idea that if you see an article and one guy is at a university and then there’s a professor where this guy got his degree, the old joke is the student wrote the article and then had to explain it to the professor. That’s really what it’s about. I would tell the students get involved with the societies. You’ll meet people and not just people that are academics, but the people in industry, too.
Freeman:
Yes.
Kraft:
They might have problems that would interest you. Or they might be able to support you and some students doing some work for them or whatever. There are all kinds of benefits for getting involved and meeting the people.
Freeman:
Absolutely. What do you see when you look at, I guess, information retrieval has certainly been a key area you focused on and influenced for many years? Where do you see that going, in the next ten years?
Kraft:
There are a couple of areas that excite me even though I'm not involved with them directly. One is cross-language retrieval. If you are looking in English, but you’ll want some documents written in Japanese, how do you match up because the syntax, the grammar, the alphabet may all be different.
People have done a lot of work in that area.
Another is getting involved with, I hate to say emotion, but if you are getting involved, say, with blogs and you want to say if you’re looking at blogs on the issue of abortion, do these blogs or twitters, tweets or whatever you’re looking at, do they favor one position versus another? Or can you detect anger? Another of course in a similar area is security. Are these people making threats? If you see words like bomb, destroy, attack, things like that, can you assume that this is a problem? I think those are some areas in retrieval that kind of exciting stuff. It’s kind of controversial, but for example, are Twitter and others favoring one political aspect or another?
Freeman:
Yes. That’s certainly becoming a bigger deal.
Kraft:
Yes.
Freeman:
Is there anything that we haven’t talked about or is that you’d like to talk about in terms of your career and profession?
Kraft:
No, I’ve just gotten involved. With the various professional societies, it was suggested to me, hey, you should be involved with this society, they’re doing some really good things, so you get interested and learn. When I went to LSU, I joined the [IEEE] Computer Society and ACM. I’ve kept my membership in the Operations Research Society which is now called INFORMS (Institute for Operations, Research Management Sciences). I kept my membership there to keep my hand in and see what’s going on with them, but I'm really not doing operations research per se. Just get involved in the profession that you’re in and meet and get involved with the people in that society. I'm honored to be where I’ve been because I did that.
Freeman:
I was also thinking just knowing your background, are there a few words you want to say because you’ve done outstanding work giving back to the community outside of your direct profession?
Kraft:
Oh, yes. I tried to be involved. I’ve been involved with synagogue activities, but I’ve also been involved with United Way in Baton Rouge, and for a little bit of time with the Colorado Springs United Way. That’s always been an honor and a pleasure. One of the things we did in the Baton Rouge United Way, they got involved with trying to measure the benefit. So, you say, yes, you have an organization like say Red Cross and you do certain things. Can you show that there was benefit? Like you fed so many people or you housed or clothed so many people or saved so many people from floods and fires and earthquakes and what have you? We were trying to get involved with trying to think of measurements that you could do. As an operation researcher that made sense to me, so I got to help with that. In addition to that, I have been involved with the Louisiana Science Fair, the regional and the state science festival. I'm now chair of the committee for the Pikes Peak Regional Science and Engineering Fair. It’s a fun thing to do and knowing that you’re making a little bit of a contribution to the community. I'm not claiming I'm doing as much as possible but I'm doing what I can do, and I feel good about that. So just, again, just get involved.
Freeman:
The other thing which I had not asked you is have any of your children gotten involved in areas that have interested you?
Kraft:
My youngest daughter is a naval officer doing healthcare administration and she’s been very busy with that. Since I was teaching for a while at the Air Force Academy, my joke is that I’ve forgiven her for going Navy because she’s given me three grandkids.
Freeman:
Oh, that’s great, [chuckling].
Kraft:
Yes. My older daughter got her degree at Purdue. Both got undergraduate at Purdue. Then my older daughter went from mechanical engineering at Purdue to civil engineering doing construction engineering management. She was living in Denver working on a project in Denver to widen the highway I-70 going from the east into the City of Denver. Now she’s in Detroit working for a different company doing quality control for construction projects.
Freeman:
Gee, that’s kind of some nice threads there. Yes. You have come far from the furniture frames, huh? [Laughing]
Kraft:
Yes, oh, a long way. By the way, my older daughter has referred to my industrial engineering background as imaginary engineering.
Freeman:
[Laughing].
Kraft:
What can you do with them?
Freeman:
Yes. Well, it’s quite productive. I think we have a very good arc of your life and work, so we’ll get a transcript, and work together processing it.
Kraft:
Okay.
Freeman:
Depending on the transcript of this interview, we can set up another session, but I think we got a pretty good flow through many of your career highlights.
Kraft:
Sure. It’s been my pleasure working with you, Gene. Thank you.
Freeman:
Yes. It’s been an honor for me. At this point then I will go ahead (I'm going to talk to you for a moment), but I'll go ahead and stop the recording. I think we got the relevant information.
Kraft:
Okay. Sure.
