Appendix A: Letter of Reference

      The undersigned knew, as a fellow scientist, Mr. Fred E. Howard III during the period of 1968-1975. This association was in conjunction with research programs of the U.S. Air Force in specific areas of applied Cybernetics. Cybernetics is involved in the study of the functions and processes of living systems, their descriptions, and attempts to realize some of these functions peculiar to living systems by means of hardware and computer software. Some examples would be pattern recognition and classification, and learning behavior.

      With respect to pattern recognition and classification, Mr. Howard made some significant and noteworthy contributions. Much early work had been done on the classification aspect of this general area, i.e., given a list of descriptive characteristics for objects, to sort the objects in some efficient way with respect to these characteristics. A paradigm of such a task is the classification of printed alphanumeric character of normalized size and orientation. Many efficient algorithms had been devised over the years for this sort of problem. However, for complex patterns the great majority of these algorithms are unworkable in practice. For example, if alphanumeric characters are not printed but handwritten and not normalized to size and orientation, then it becomes extremely difficult to devise good criteria with which to carry out the sorting or classification task. The devising of such criteria is what is more properly termed the recognition task as distinct from the classification task. This is usually a job done by the human investigator. Mr. Howard was closely concerned with the problem of how to automate, in hardware and computer programming, this recognition aspect of the problem. As a great majority of patterns of human interest are visual, Mr. Howard was initially involved with optical processing techniques. Given some two-dimensional image (or picture) to discover if there was some set of criteria related to the image by means of which one could sort out objects of interest in the picture, and most important to see if one could automate part or all of this discovery process. His work in this area brought in some highly abstract mathematical notions such as Fourier, Walsh and general transform theory. He devised an integral intensity transform function known as the "sti" function as an outgrowth of some of this work.

      As "recognition" as such requires some sort of trial and error type of learning, Mr. Howard got rather deeply involved in some aspects of mathematical learning theory and nonparametric statistics in attempting to implement and automate this discovery process which is such an integral part of the recognition task. It is the opinion of the undersigned that Mr. Howard's work in this area was significant, and certain elements of his work are being carried forward by other workers in this field.

      During the course of all the above, Mr. Howard became extremely caught up in the field of psychology as such. He became quite involved with Carl Jung's psychological studies of alchemy and so-called occult phenomena.

      The undersigned has been a long time member of the C.G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology and therefore can say to the point that Mr. Howard became quite knowledgeable on the topic of alchemy and occult matters as addressed by Jung and his school. Concurrently, Mr. Howard made himself quite familiar with the occult literature in general as well as related literature from anthropology and studies in myth and religion.

      In the time I have been associated with Mr. Howard, he has demonstrated a good scientific capability. He is endowed with a highly creative, curious and intuitive mind. His philosophical position is generally that of a humanist and even in his scientific work he has not hesitated to look beyond it to its possible impact on human problems. I would not hesitate to recommend him to any university or research position.

(Signed)
CECIL W. GWINN
Physicist
Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio