Research and teaching plan
Research interests
From a computer science perspective, I seek to describe
a computer based on the brain, which will have some
of the legendary properties of the brain, its parallelism,
intelligence, flexibility and resilience.
I have developed an intelligent parallel architecture which
can be applied to computation problems of all kinds, including multiagent
systems. My work is unique in developing an approach to
intelligent agents which is based on the brain.
The architecture should have a straightforward implementation in hardware.
From a biological perspective,
I seek to bring computer science concepts and methods
to bear on the problem of the scientific understanding the brain.
Overall research goals
The overall problems I am trying to solve
for my computational model include:
1. Behaviors:
(i) how to model problem solving behavior,
(ii) how to recognize natural language sentences,
(iii) how to model social interaction, and
(iv) how to model motivation of the system.
2. Learning:
(i) how to learn problem-solving knowledge for "simple" problems
using in psychological experiments and clinical diagnosis, and
(ii) how to model the development of social relationships.
3. Relationship to neural nets:
(i) how to find an equivalent neural representation
of the model,
(ii) how to model neural development, and
(iii) how to model neural pathologies.
4. How to implement the model as a computer
using present-day technologies such as FPGA or asynchronous VLSI.
5. How to understand the model theoretically
as a computational system.
Research activities
Development of the computational model.
The most important goals I have right now
concern getting the model to do problem solving and learning
of problem solving strategies.
Collaborations in computer science.
I am interested to link up with projects and people
where my work can contribute. For example, applications
to virtual agents and intelligent robots.
Collaboration in life sciences.
I plan to continue my existing collaborations with
Doris Zumpe of Emory University, Gerard Kempen of Leiden University,
and Tim Shallice of the Institute
of Cognitive Neuroscience, London University.
My programming language.
I will continue developing, and will distribute
my brain programming language, BAD.
A key structural principle for my research is the development
of a network of collaborators and the provision of a common
representation and programming language by means of which
scientific knowledge of brain function can be expressed
and tested.
Industrial collaboration.
I plan to continue my collaboration with the Fujitsu Network Agents
Research Group in San Jose, California, headed by Frank McCabe.
Teaching interests
I have experience in teaching computer science, see
http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~bond/teach.html .
At Caltech I've been teaching three courses which form a year-long
sequence -
CS101a, functional programming (Scheme, ML, April,
lambda calculus, SECD etc.), then
CS101b, logic programming
(Prolog and AI planning and belief maintenance in Prolog),
and then
CS101c, intelligent multiagent programming
(using Prolog on a network on unix machines)
These courses are taught entirely using the
web, please see my website.
I will be happy to play my part in teaching introductory
computer science courses.
In addition, using the BAD language,
it will now be possible for me to co-teach courses
in cognitive psychology in which theories are presented
as programs that can be run, and students can learn to express
theories as programs and to test them against experiment.
I can also teach a
project course in system modeling of the
primate brain. I have been doing this at Caltech,
CS286, please see my website.
More detailed plans,
for research -
http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~bond/rplan.html,
for teaching -
http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~bond/tplan.html,
for funding -
http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~bond/fund.html,
and for implementation -
http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~bond/prog.html,
can be found on my website.
Alan Bond
2003-12-31