Teleology which focuses instead on goal-contribution. With the objective goals of organisms being survival and inclusive fitness, Piccinini and Maley define teleological functions to be “a stable contribution by a trait (or component, activity, property) of organisms belonging to a biological population to an objective goal of those organisms.” Julian Bigelow, Arturo Rosenblueth, and Norbert Wiener have conceived of feedback mechanisms as lending a teleology to machinery. Wiener, a mathematician, coined the term 'cybernetics' to denote the study of "teleological mechanisms." Cybernetics is the study of the communication and control of regulatory feedback both in living beings and machines, and in
Norbert Wiener Center for Harmonic Analysis and Applications is actively involved in research project involved with waveform design, dimension reduction, geospatial terrain and image processing, data fusion, phase retrieval frames, and analysis on graphs. The Norbert Wiener Center hosts the annual conference, the February Fourier Talks (FFT). The first FFT was held in 2002 and 2003, and then annually since 2006. The aim of the annual FFT is to bring together researchers from academia, government, and industry, as a means to spur innovation and foster interaction in Harmonic Analysis and its Applications. The FFT lasts two days and consists of approximately 15 half-hour talks, a distinguished lecture, a