SCIoI’s Scientific Advisory Board (2)

An important scientific goal of SCIoI is to unite the disciplines of intelligence research. This, of course, is a substantial challenge. To help us address it, we have assembled a scientific advisory board. As you can see below, the board consists of pioneers in the study of intelligence. The members, all external to SCIoI, are highly accomplished scientists and also possess extensive interdisciplinary research experience. Each of them comes from a different area of intelligence research, covering both the study of natural intelligence and the study of artificial intelligence.  Each board member contributes extensive experience in building bridges between disciplines. Together with these inspiring persons, we know we will be able to achieve our goal of building a unified Science of Intelligence.
Meet our Scientific Advisory Board:

Josh Tenebaum
(MIT)

Josh Tenenbaum studies the computational basis of human learning and inference. His work is driven by the goals of trying to achieve a better understanding of human learning in computational terms and trying to build computational systems that come closer to the capacities of human learners. Through a combination of mathematical modeling, computer simulation, and behavioral experiments, Tenenbaum tries to uncover the logic behind our everyday inductive leaps, including constructing perceptual representations, learning concepts and words, inferring causal connections, noticing coincidences, and predicting the future. To approach these topics, he uses a range of empirical methods drawn chiefly from Bayesian statistics and probability theory, but also from geometry, graph theory, and linear algebra.
Tenenbaum is the Paul E. Newton Career Development Professor of Cognitive Science and Computation in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
http://cocosci.mit.edu/josh

Patricia Churchland
(UCSD)

For decades, Patricia Churchland has contributed to the fields of philosophy of neuroscience, philosophy of the mind and neuroethics. Her research has centered on the interface between neuroscience and philosophy with a current focus on the association of morality and the social brain. A Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego and Adjunct Professor at the Salk Institute, Pat holds degrees from Oxford University, the University of Pittsburg and the University of British Columbia. She has been awarded the MacArthur Prize, The Rossi Prize for Neuroscience and the Prose Prize for Science. She has authored multiple pioneering books, her most recent being Touching a Nerve. She has served as President of the American Philosophical Association and the Society for Philosophy and Psychology. Pat lives in Solana Beach, California, with her husband Paul, a neurophilosopher, and their labradoodle Millie. They have two children, Anne and Mark, both neuroscientists.
https://patriciachurchland.com/

Naomi Leonard
(Princeton University)

Naomi Leonard’s main area of research and teaching is in the field of control and dynamical systems, where she has made contributions both to theory and to application. The field involves designing and analyzing feedback and the behavior of complex, dynamical systems. In recent years she has focused on multi-agent systems in engineering (design of robotic networks) and in nature (analysis of animal and human groups) and mathematical approaches for leveraging insights across contexts. Her work examines the role of distributed feedback and interconnection in collective motion and collective decision-making. For example, she designed distributed feedback strategies for agents who respond to their neighbors and the environment to perform as a group in climbing gradients and tracking level sets in the sampled field as well as in realizing motion patterns that maximize information in sensor measurements.

Leonard is a MacArthur Fellow, an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the ASME, IEEE, IFAC, and SIAM. She received the BSE in Mechanical Engineering from Princeton University, worked for four years as an engineer in the electric power industry, and then received the MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland.

Linda Smith
(Indiana University)

Linda B. Smith is a Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Indiana University. Smith earned her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Smith is the author of more than 100 publications on cognitive and linguistic development in young children.
Her central theoretical question is the study of developmental process and mechanisms of change. Her work focuses on early changes in perception, language, and action and how those changes in these areas support each other particularly around the age (12 months to 24 months) that children break into language. Her research takes a systems approach, seeking to understand how multiple components interact over nested time scales and levels of analysis and how, in so doing, they yield an individual’s developmental path. Click here to visit her lab website