George Leitmann, professor emeritus of mechanical engineering, has been elected a foreign fellow of the Georgian Academy of Sciences. Leitmann, who serves as the college's faculty chair, joined the faculty in 1957. His research interests include control theory, decision analysis and game theory.

Donald O. Pederson, professor emeritus, and Ernest S. Kuh, former dean of the College of Engineering and professor in the Graduate School from electrical engineering and computer sciences, have been awarded the Japanese Foundation for Computers and Communication Promotion's 1996 C&C Prize.

Pederson and Kuh share the award with alumnus Ron Rohrer, a former faculty member in electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.

The award recognizes their ground-breaking work in the computer-aided design of large-scale electronic integrated circuits, including circuit simulation and layout.

Software tools developed from the group's research, like SPICE ‚Ýa pioneering computer program for the computer-aided design of integrated circuitsãhave made a monumental impact on industry.

The award was presented at an Oct. 30 ceremony in Tokyo.

J. David Rogers, lecturer in civil and environmental engineering, was recently honored with the 1996 R.H. Jahns Distinguished Lectureship Award of the Association of Engineering Geologists and Geological Society of America.

This joint society award is made annually to an engineering geologist whose ability in original research and oral communication has helped to foster geology and civil engineering students' understanding of engineering geology.

The award carries a travel stipend that will allow Rogers to visit 32 universities and 12 professional meetings to speak on the reassessment of the St. Francis Dam disaster, which was profiled in his recent book on the topic.

The Tokyo-based Okawa Foundation for Information and Telecommunications has awarded its prestigious Okawa Prize for 1996 to Lotfi A. Zadeh in recognition of his outstanding contribution to information science through the development of fuzzy logic and its applications. Zadeh is professor emeritus of electrical engineering and computer sciences and director of the Berkeley Initiative in Soft Computing.

Fuzzy logic is based on theory that Zadeh pioneered in the mid-1960s. In a break with traditions of Aristotelian logic, it attempts to mirror the imprecision of the real world by creating a model for human reasoning in which everything, including truth, is a matter of degree.

The Okawa Prize is given annually to individuals who have made seminal contributions to information and telecommunication technologies. It includes an award of 10 million yen, or about $100,000.

Zadeh received his PhD from Columbia University. He joined the Berkeley faculty in 1959 and served as chair of electrical engineering and computer sciences from 1963 to 1968. He has received numerous awards in recognition of his development of fuzzy logic.