Biographical Notes on External (Non-BT) Workshop Participants

The following biographical sketches were provided by workshop attendees in 1998 and are included here without modification.

Gert Cauwenberghs

Gert Cauwenberghs (SM 1989, M 1994) received the Engineer’s degree in applied physics from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium, in 1988, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1989 and 1994, respectively. In 1994, he joined the Johns Hopkins University as an assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering. His research covers VLSI circuits, systems and algorithms for parallel signal processing, adaptive neural computation, and low-power coding and instrumentation. He received the National Science Foundation Career Award in 1997, and was Francqui Fellow of the Belgian American Educational Foundation in 1988.

Daniel C. Dennett

Daniel C. Dennett is director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University and author of books and articles on consciousness, artificial intelligence, evolution, how the brain works, etc. He is the Consulting Philosopher on Rodney Brooks’s Cog Project at MIT’s AI Lab. He serves as Consulting Editor, etc., on various journals in the field: Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Cognition, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Adaptive Behavior, Artificial Life.

Dario Floreano

Dario Floreano received a B.A. training in visual psychophysics at the Gestalt school in Trieste, an M.Sc. in Neural Computation, and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science. He spent research periods at the National Research Council in Rome, at the University of Stirling and Edinburgh, and at the Laboratory of Cognitive Technology at the AREA Science Park in Trieste. Since 1993 he has been applying evolutionary and neural techniques to autonomous mobile robots at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne where he currently is senior researcher affiliated to the Laboratory of Microcomputing and to the Centre of Neural Computation.

Stephen Grossberg

Stephen Grossberg is Wang Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems and Professor of Mathematics, Psychology, and Biomedical Engineering at Boston University. He is the founder and Director of the Center for Adaptive Systems, founder and Chairman the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems, founder and first President of the International Neural Network Society, founder and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Neural Networks. Grossberg is also an editor of many other journals, including Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Cognitive Brain Research, Neural Computation and IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks. He was general chairman of the IEEE First International Conference on Neural Networks. His lecture series at MIT Lincoln Laboratory on neural network technology was instrumental in motivating the laboratory to initiate the national DARPA Study on Neural Networks. He received the 1991 IEEE Neural Network Pioneer award, the 1992 INNS Leadership Award, and the 1992 Thinking Technology Award of the Boston Computer Society. He was elected a Fellow of the American Psychological Association in 1994 and a member of the Society of Experimental Psychologists in 1996.

He and his colleagues have pioneered and developed a number of the fundamental principles, mechanisms, and architectures that form the foundation for contemporary neural network research, particularly those which enable individuals to adapt successfully in real-time to unexpected environmental changes. Such models have been used both to analyse and predict interdisciplinary data about mind and brain, and to suggest novel architectures for technological applications.

Grossberg received his graduate training at Stanford University and Rockefeller University, and was a Professor at MIT before assuming his present position at Boston University.

Inman Harvey

Inman Harvey took a first degree in Mathematics and Philosophy at Cambridge University, many years ago in the days when Philosophy there was “Moral Science”. After a brief sally into Social Anthropology he then left academic life for many years to set up a business and other ventures/adventures. In 1988 he came to the University of Sussex to research for a doctorate on artificial evolution, and helped create the field of Evolutionary Robotics. He is a founder member of the Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems group at Sussex, where he is a research fellow in the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics.

Phil Husbands

Phil Husbands is Reader in Artificial Intelligence in the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, University of Sussex and joint-coordinator (with Michael O’Shea) of the Sussex Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics. He has a BSc. in Physics from the University of Manchester, an MSc. in Computer Science from South Bank Polytechnic and a PhD. in Computer-aided Engineering from the University of Edinburgh. Since the early 1980s his research interests have centred around the application of evolutionary computing techniques to problems in science and engineering. After working in a variety of academic and industrial settings, and making a failed bid to become Britain’s answer to Miles Davis, he arrived at Sussex in 1989. A strong focus of his work (in collaboration with various others, including Inman Harvey) is the long-term investigation of the artificial evolution of nervous systems for robots, with emphasis on visually guided behaviours. In collaboration with Michael O’Shea and other neuroscientists, he is currently investigating a class of biologically inspired behaviour generating networks incorporating diffusable modulators.

Dave Keating

Dave Keating joined the Department of Cybernetics at the University of Reading as an undergraduate in 1980 and never quite managed to leave. Having read Cybernetics and Control Engineering for his BSc he was persuaded to stay on to research towards a PhD. The subject of his thesis was the development of a force-feedback microphone. He was employed as a lecturer in 1988 and has lectured in many subjects but has concentrated on electronics and feedback. His research has moved from Audio through sensors, technology & disability and to mobile robotics. He is currently researching the broad area of group learning and behaviour in mobile robot and other agents. He is co-ordinator of the Cybernetic Intelligence research area and founder/leader of the Mobile Robot research group.

Michael Lockwood

Michael Lockwood is University Lecturer in Philosophy at the Oxford University Department for Continuing Education, and a Fellow of Green College, Oxford. He studied Philosophy and Psychology at Exeter College, Oxford and did his doctorate under the supervision of the late Professor Sir Alred Ayer. For five years he was Assistant Professor in Philosophy at New York University, and was subsequently (and far more lucratively!) employed as a systems analyst for the New York and American Stock Exchanges. His most significant publication is the book Mind, Brain and the Quantum (Blackwell, 1989). He is married to a doctor, and has three sons, aged 2, 4 and 16.

Michael O’Shea

Michael O’Shea is Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, founding Director of the Sussex Centre for Neuroscience and co-Director of the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics. He received a first in Biological Sciences from the University of Leicester in 1968 and a doctorate in Neuroscience from the University of Southampton in 1971. From 1971-1974 he was NATO postdoctoral fellow at the University of California at Berkeley and from 1974-1976 postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge. He was then Assistant and later Associate Professor of Neurobiology in the School of Medicine at the University of Chicago and in 1986 he was nominated Professor of Neurobiology at the University of Geneva, Switzerland before returning to the UK in 1988 as University of London Professor of Molecular Cell Biology. In 1991 an Interdisciplinary Research Centre in Neuroscience was established at the University of Sussex and he was appointed as the Founding Director. In 1996, in association with computer scientist Phil Husbands, he established the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at Sussex.

His research covers the analysis of neural circuits in the brains of relatively simple invertebrate animals, neural mechanisms of insect vision, the molecular biology of chemical neurotransmission, the role of nitric oxide and other gaseous transmitters. Currently he is using molecular, electrophysiological and computational methods to explore new dimensions in neural information processing which have been opened by the unexpected recent discovery that diffusing gases function as signalling molecules in the brain.

Jordan Pollack

Jordan B. Pollack has been closely involved with computing since 1974, and he has, at various times, focused on programming languages, computer graphics, architecture, parallel processing, microcomputers, and scientific computation before finally specializing in Artificial Intelligence. Jordan has worked for IBM and HP among others and is scientific advisor to Abuzz Technologies.

He received the Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1987 from the University of Illinois, and is associate professor of computer science and complex systems at Brandeis University.

His laboratory, Dynamical and Evolutionary Machine Organization (DEMO) conducts funded research on evolutionary and neural network approaches to machine and human learning, robotics, artificial life, and complex systems. On the internet, he founded the comp.sys.laptops newsgroup and the Neuroprose technical report repository. He has authored over 60 articles, 2 books, and holds 2 US patents.

Moshe Sipper

Moshe Sipper is a senior researcher in the Logic Systems Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland. He received a B.A. in Computer Science from the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology, an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University. His chief interests involve the application of biological principles to artificial systems, including evolutionary computation, cellular automata (with an emphasis on evolving cellular machines), bio-inspired systems, evolving hardware, complex adaptive systems, artificial life, and neural networks. Dr. Sipper has authored and co-authored several scientific papers in these areas, as well as the book Evolution of Parallel Cellular Machines: The Cellular Programming Approach (Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 1997).

He is Program Chairman of the Second International Conference on Evolvable Systems: From Biology to Hardware (ICES98), to be held in Lausanne in September 1998.

Aaron Sloman

Aaron Sloman’s first degree was in mathematics and physics, followed by a DPhil in philosophy. After teaching philosophy for several years, he was converted around 1969 by the late Max Clowes to the view that artificial intelligence provided the best context in which to investigate many old philosophical problems e.g. about the nature of language, mind, knowledge, and metaphysics. After a year learning about AI in Edinburgh in 1972-3 as SRC senior visiting fellow he returned to Sussex where he later helped to found the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, and wrote The Computer Revolution in Philosophy (1978). He continued working on philosophy, on the architecture of a visual system, and tools for teaching and research in AI, including managing the development of Poplog, a sophisticated multi-language AI development environment (used in Clementine).

After 27 years at Sussex he wanted a change and in 1991 moved to the School of Computer Science in the University of Birmingham, where he collaborates with members of the School of Psychology. He is still working on AI tools (e.g. the SIM_AGENT toolkit), hybrid architectures for intelligent agents, the evolution of consciousness and other things, modelling and explanation of emotions, issues concerned with representation, vision, and related philosophical problems.

He was a Rhodes Scholar 1957-1960, elected fellow of the American Association for AI in 1991 and in 1997 honorary life fellow of AISB. One day he will write a sequel to the 1978 book.

Keith van Rijsbergen

Keith van Rijsbergen is Head of Computing Science, Mathematics and Statistics at Glasgow University, and author of books and articles on Information Retrieval. He is Editor-in-Chief of The Computer Journal. His current research is concerned with dimensionality reduction, clustering, and logic-based retrieval. In his spare time he pursues quantum-logic and biologically inspired computation, and has more than a passing interest in the history and philosophy of science.