Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering and Statistical Science
Rhodes Hall 388, 607/255-3643; tlfine@ece.cornell.edu
B.E.E. 1958 (City College of New York); S.M. 1959, Ph.D. 1963 (Harvard)
After receiving his doctoral degree, Fine became a lecturer and research fellow in the Division of Engineering and Applied Physics at Harvard University. In 1964 he was awarded a Miller Institute Junior Research Fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley, where he remained until he came to Cornell's School of Electrical Engineering in 1966. He is a member of Cornell's graduate Fields of Applied Mathematics, Electrical Engineering, History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, and Statistics. From 1999 to 2004 Fine was Director of Cornell's Center for Applied Mathematics. He has been a visiting professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University. Fine has been elected a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for "contributions to the foundations of probabilistic reasoning and its implications for modeling and decision making." He shared in the outstanding paper awards given by the IEEE Control Systems Society in 1978-79 for his paper with W. Hwang, "Consistent Estimation of System Order," published in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, vol. AC-24. He has been an associate editor for detection and estimation and for book reviews of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, and is a past president of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society. He was awarded an IEEE Third Millenium Medal.
Fine has been a member of the governing board of the IEEE Neural Networks Council, and a founding member and director of the NIPS Foundation. He is currently a member of the Executive Committee of the Society for Imprecise Probability: Theory and Applications.
At Cornell, Fine has been awarded the following teaching prizes:
1996 Fioni Ip Li and Donald Li Excellence in Teaching Award (College of Engineering)
1998--1999 Ruth and Joel Spira Excellence in Teaching Award ( School of Elec. & Comp. Eng.);
2002 Douglas Whitney '61 Excellence in Teaching Award (College of Engineering);
With the exception of the period 1989 to 1999, when I was concerned with the theory of artificial feedforward neural networks and their applications to problems of forecasting demand for electrical power and emitter location and sensor arrays, I have focussed on issues in the foundations of probability. In particular I have been interested in comparative probability that need not have an additive representation, upper and lower probabilities that are not envelopes of a set of measures, and most recently on probability as an arbitrary set of standard probability measures. Unlike the situation in statistical hypothesis testing, no one measure in our set is deemed to be the true one or closest to the true one.
Last revised: 2 August 2005