Editorial team profiles

Citation

(2011), "Editorial team profiles", Kybernetes, Vol. 40 No. 9/10. https://doi.org/10.1108/k.2011.06740iaa.002

Editorial team profiles

Article Type: Editorial team profiles From: Kybernetes, Volume 40, Issue 9/10

Anniversary editorial team

Patrons and Editorial Advisory Board

The current Editorial Advisory Board (EAB) is listed at the beginning of this issue. This journal has relied heavily on the support and guidance given by its EAB since its foundation 40 years ago. During these four decades, the EAB consisted of members who were the leading cyberneticians of their generation. They were joined in the 1990s by well-known systemists and management scientists when the journal remit was widened.

At this time, the journal was honoured by the acceptance of Professors Stafford Beer and Robert Vallée at the publisher’s invitation to be the first Honorary Patrons.

Journal editors

Since 1971, the journal has been produced by its editor and supported by section editors. Initially, it was published by Thales Publications (WO) Ltd and now by Emerald Group Publishing Ltd.

Professor John Rose (1917-2007) was the journal’s Founding Editor. Tributes to his enormous contribution to cybernetics, systems and to other fields of endeavour were published in 2009 (Kybernetes, 2009). He was succeeded in 1988 by Professor Brian Rudall, the current Editor-in-Chief, who with the enthusiastic backing of the new publishers embarked on a programme which aimed to both increase the scope and size of the journal, as well as to ensure its status as an important global force that was premier in its fields.

The journal was fortunate that Dr Alex M. Andrew, who had an earlier association with Kybernetes, accepted the new appointment of Internet Editor, a new post that reflected the changes and challenges of a new era in publishing. Other appointments were also sanctioned by the new publisher and the late Dr Jane Mann was appointed Book Reviews and Reports Section Editor and Joint Editor of the section “Contemporary Cybernetics, Systems and Management Sciences” (Rudall and Mann, 2006-2010).

We are also grateful to Professor Andrew Adamatzky for his contributions as Software Reviews Editor.

Current editors’ profiles

Brian H. Rudall – Editor-in-Chief

Professor Rudall (UK) joined the Founder Editor of Kybernetes, Professor John Rose as the Section Editor for “Contemporary Systems and Cybernetics” at the launch of the journal in 1972.

He became the journal’s editor in 1987 and four decades later he still compiles this section (Kybernetes, 2011) and is proud of its contribution to the success of Kybernetes.

He is also pleased that with the dedicated support of the publisher and its supportive staff the journal has maintained its high standards and believes it has earned the praise and congratulations it has received on the anniversary, of its foundation.

Rudall (1996) was the subject of a “Cyber-profile” published in the Silver Anniversary Issues of this journal which includes his curricular vita. Now, 15 years later, and having produced another 150 issues of Kybernetes he can look back with some satisfaction at his contributions to the cybernetics, systems and management sciences communities.

He was not only Editor-in-Chief of Kybernetes but also of the Journal of the Institution of Computer Science, Joint Editor of Gower Technical Press’s Automation and Robotic Times, and an Editor of Cambridge University Press’s Robotica, International Journal of Information, Education & Research in Robotics & Artificial Intelligence (1993-2009). He was also on the editorial board of five other research journals.

Professor Rudall carried out some of the pioneering research and development in computer system and software specification and two formal descriptions of the human-machine interface, through cybernetics and systems (Rudall, 1981; Rudall and Comes, 1986).

In addition to his more formal researches, he has had wide-ranging interests in extending the uses of computer systems, and in computer education. He is the author of numerous computer algorithms and has published extensively as an author of books, monographs and full scientific papers.

Currently, Brian Rudall is Honorary Fellow or Fellow of some eight of the world’s major academic bodies and institutions.

He continues with his research and development interests as Director of the Norbert Wiener Institute and as Principal Consultant of Computer Science International. He was awarded the Norbert Wiener Memorial Gold Medal of the World Organisation of Systems and Cybernetics (WOSC) and is currently the first Vice-President of this organisation which has selected Kybernetes as its official publication.

Dr Alex M. Andrew – Internet Editor

Alex Andrew graduated in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Glasgow University, Scotland, then joined the Departments of Physiology and Psychological Medicine there. Part of the time with these affiliations was spent on leave of absence with Warren McCulloch’s group in MIT. Work in Glasgow was largely on electronic instrumentation for neurophysiology, and also on neurophysiology as such, and in MIT was on the visual system of the frog. In 1957, he graduated with PhD for a thesis based on these studies.

He then worked on machine learning at the National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, England, and gave a paper at the first IFAC Congress, Moscow 1960. He later joined the management consultancy firm SIGMA, managed by Stafford Beer, for two years, followed by a year in Heinz von Foerster’s group in the University of Illinois, and was then a member of the Department of Cybernetics in the University of Reading, England, until he took early retirement in 1982 and joined with his wife Joyce in commercial activity, until her death in 1993. The academic year 1987-1988 was spent in the University of the Aegean, Izmir, Turkey, teaching Artificial Intelligence. He has since married Ludmila Levkina, a microbiologist and former wife of the Russian cybernetician Anatoli Napalkov.

A report written in 1965, while with Heinz von Foerster’s group, introduced a principle of “significance feedback” of which one version is equivalent to the “backpropagation of error” that came later and is the basis of most work on artificial neural nets in recent decades. The place of continuity in the operation of intelligent systems, real or artificial, has been a primary interest arising from consideration of machine learning, partly following the lead of the early pioneer Donald MacKay. The issues have been treated in a recent book (Andrew, 2009).

He is currently Director-General of the WOSC and a council member of the UK Cybernetics Society. An autobiography (Andrew, 2011) is available (see also the Cyberprofile of Dr Andrew published in Kybernetes (Rudall, 2009) for the occasion of the presentation of the WOSC, Norbert Wiener Memorial Gold Medal.)