Organizing Committee

Maps

Biographical information on the ICCM-2001 Organizing committee.

As of May, 2000:

Erik M. Altmann, Michigan State University - Dr. Altmann is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Michigan State University. His research addresses attention and episodic memory, task switching, and the processing of goals, alerts, and interruptions, and he has extensive experience building models of behavioral data using the ACT-R and Soar computational cognitive architectures. He received his Ph.D. from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, with Bonnie E. John and Allen Newell, and was a post-doctoral fellow (with Wayne D. Gray) and Research Psychologist in the Human Factors and Applied Cognition Program at George Mason University.

John R. Anderson, Carnegie Mellon University. The goal of John Anderson’s research is to understand how people organize knowledge that they acquire from their diverse experiences to produce intelligent behavior. The concern is very much with how it is all put together and this has led to the focus on what are called "unified theories of cognition." A unified theory is a cognitive architecture that can perform in detail a full range of cognitive tasks. Their theory is called ACT-R (Anderson & Lebiere, 1998) and takes the form of a computer simulation which is capable of performing and learning from the same tasks that subjects in their laboratories work at.
ACT-R is also an instance of a hybrid cognitive architecture in that it represents knowledge symbolically as rules and facts but also has a neurally-based activation process that determines which facts and rules get deployed in which situations. They have engaged in extensive analyses of the situations which people have to deal with in order to understand how each of these components should work together to yield adaptive behavior.

Axel Cleeremans, Universite Libre de Bruxelles. Dr. Axel Cleeremans's background is in cognitive psychology and connectionism. After graduating from Carnegie Mellon University in 1991, he returned to Brussels as a Research Associate with the Belgian NSF. He also teaches at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles, where he created and coordinates an advanced degree in Cognitive Science.
Over the last ten years, his research has focussed on the role of consciousness in learning. Cleeremans is specifically interested in exploring whether and under which conditions learning can take place without awareness. His first take on this controversial issue has been to propose detailed computational models of performance in simple tasks such as sequence learning. More recently, he has become increasingly interested in consciousness itself, and is currently pursuing several relevant research projects, some of which involve brain imaging techniques.
Axel Cleeremans is editor of Psychologica Belgica - Belgium's main scientific psychology journal, and also acts as an associate editor for several other journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology and the European Journal of Cognitive Psychology. He is involved in several scientific societies, including the Belgian Psychological Society (as vice-president) and the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (as a member of the executive committee).
Cleeremans is the main organizer of ASSC4 - the fourth conference of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. This will take place on June 29th - July 2nd, in Brussels, Belgium, and will be dedicated to "The unity of Consciousness: Binding, Integration, and Dissociation".

Gary Cottrell, University of California, San Diego - Dr. Garrison W. Cottrell received his PhD in Computer Science in 1985 from the University of Rochester under James F. Allen. His postdoctoral adviser was David E. Rumelhart at UCSD. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UCSD. His thesis developed a connectionist model of word sense disambiguation that explained then current psycholinguistic results on the multiple activation of word meanings and their resolution based upon sentence context. The model also explained results in agrammatic aphasia; in particular, the result that agrammatic aphasics could make grammaticality judgements on sentences they could not understand. His research continues to be strongly interdisciplinary. It concerns using neural networks as a computational model applied to problems in Cognitive Science & Artificial Intelligence, Engineering and Biology.  His current research attempts to understand the computational underpinnings of domains such as natural language processing, processing of faces and other visual stimuli, and invertebrate circuits. References.

Wayne D. Gray, George Mason University - Dr. Gray is a researcher in the fields of human-computer interaction (HCI), cognitive task analysis, computational cognitive modeling, cognitive workload, and human error. He earned his Ph.D. from U. C. Berkeley in 1979. His first position was with the U. S. Army Research Institute where he worked on tactical team training (at the Monterey Field Unit) and later on the application of artificial intelligence (AI) technology to training for air-defense systems (HAWK) (at ARI-HQ Alexandria, VA). He spent a post-doctoral year with Prof. John R. Anderson's lab at Carnegie Mellon University before joining the AI Laboratory of NYNEX' Science & Technology Division. At NYNEX, he applied cognitive task analysis and cognitive modeling to the design and evaluation of interfaces for large, commercial telecommunications systems. Since joining academe, he has received grants from government, industry, and private foundations. Dr. Gray is an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (ToCHI) and the Human Factors journal. With Richard Young and Susan Kirschenbaum he edited a  special issue on Cognitive Architectures and HCI for the Human-Computer Interaction journal. He has done extensive modeling using GOMS and CPM-GOMS. His recent modeling has used the embodied version of ACT-R -- ACT-R/PM. References.

John Hummel, University California, Los Angeles

Christian Lebiere, Carnegie Mellon University - Christian Lebiere is a Research Scientist in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Liege (Belgium) and his M.S. and Ph.D. from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. During his graduate career, he worked on the development of connectionist models, including the Cascade-Correlation neural network learning algorithm that has been used in hundreds of scientific, technical and commercial applications. Since 1990, he has worked on the development of the ACT-R hybrid cognitive architecture and is co-author with John R. Anderson of the 1998 book _The_Atomic_Components_of_Thought_. His main research interest is cognitive architectures and their applications to psychology, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, decision-making, game theory, and computer-generated forces. References

Frank E. Ritter, The Pennsylvania State University - Dr. Frank Ritter is a psychologist and computer scientist interested in creating theories of human behavior predicting that humans are intelligent because the theories are intelligent.  An important aspect of this work is making the creation of such models more routine, which he works on with researchers from the UK and America.  With Richard Young he has prepared a tutorial on cognitive architectures, which they have presented fifteen times in Europe and Japan.  He is also interested in having models interact with interfaces (Ritter et al, in press) and applying them in various ways in psychology (Jones, Ritter, & Wood, 2000; Lonsdale & Ritter, 2000).  He is an associate professor in the School of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State.  He is also affilidated with the Psychology and Computer Science departments there.

Christian D. Schunn, George Mason University

Gerhard Strube, University of Freiberg - Prof. Gerhard Strube is director of the Center for Cognitive Science at the University of Freiburg, Germany. He earned his Dr. phil. and Dr. phil. habil. degrees from the University of Munich in 1977 and 1984 (assistant prof. 1977-1982). 1982-1987 senior scientist with the Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research. 1987-1991 full professor of cognitive psychology at the Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany. Since 1991 he has been with the University of Freiburg (and declined an offer from Zurich University in 1996). Numerous grants in the fields of computational psycholinguistics, spatial reasoning, design and problem solving. He is currently president of the German cognitive science society and editor-in-chief of Cognitive Science Quarterly.

Ron Sun, University of Missouri, Columbia - Ron Sun received his Ph.D in Computer Science from Brandeis University in 1991.
His research interests lie in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, especially with Connectionist Models and Hybrid Systems. Specifically,  he worked on Learning and Skill Acquisition (in both humans and machines), Everyday Commonsense Reasoning, and Multi-Agent Systems. He has published more than 100 papers and 5 books in these areas. Dr. Sun has been instrumental in organizing some of the most important events related to hybrid models and cognitive modeling, such as (co)chairing the 1992 AAAI Workshop on Integrating Connectionist and Symbolic Processes, the 1995 IJCAI Workshop on Connectionist Symbolic Integration, and the 1996 AAAI Workshop on Computational Cognitive Modeling, and (co)editing the 1994 Connection Science special issue on hybrid models and the 1998 IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks special issue on hybrid models. Dr. Sun is the co-editor-in-chief of the journal Cognitive Systems Research (Elsevier), and also serves on the editorial boards of Connection Science, Applied Intelligence, and Neural Computing Surveys. He is a senior member of IEEE. He received the 1991 David Marr Award from Cognitive Science Society. He is listed in Who's Who in Science and Engineering (4th and 5th edition), Who's Who in the World (16th edition), and Who's Who in America (53rd edition). References.

Niels Taatgen, University. of Groningen

Richard M. Young, University of Hertfordshire - Richard M Young earned his BA from Cambridge in 1965 in Mathematics and
Electrical Sciences, then stayed on to study Experimental Psychology.  He obtained an MA in Experimental Psychology from Harvard University in 1968, and a PhD in Psychology from Carnegie Mellon University in 1973.  He worked in the Department of Artificial Intelligence at Edinburgh as an SSRC Research Fellow from 1973-78.  From 1978-97 he was a Research Scientist at the MRC Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge.  In 1997 he joined the Psychology Dept at University of Hertfordshire, where he was appointed Professor of Cognitive Science in 1998. Young's research interests have always been in the area of cognitive modelling, at first using production systems and then cognitive architectures such as Soar or ACT-R.  Since 1986 most of that work has been on user modelling for human-computer interaction (HCI) (e.g. Young, Green & Simon, 1989).  The outcomes of two projects in the early 1990s include a cognitive model accounting for users' acquisition of task-action mappings, for the display-based nature of skilled computer usage, and for the fundamental role of recognition memory and recognition-based problem solving in learning to use an interactive computer (Howes & Young, 1996).  Another outcome was an initial cognitive model of the exploratory learning that occurs when experienced users have to use unfamiliar software (Rieman, Young & Howes, 1996).  Young is co-author of a paper describing the contribution of Soar to user modelling in HCI (Howes & Young, 1997), and of a paper exploring the implications of these cognitive architectures for human memory (Young & Lewis, 1999).  His more applied work in HCI includes the later development (Blandford & Young, 1996) of the notion of a "programmable user model" begun in the Alvey project, a study of the applicability of the technique by trainee designers (Blandford, Buckingham Shum & Young, 1998), and a special issue of the journal Human-Computer Interaction on the topic of cognitive architectures in HCI (Gray, Young & Kirschenbaum, 1997).  He is currently co-editing (with Frank Ritter) another journal special issue, this time on the ways that cognitive modelling contributes to the improved design of interactive systems.  References.