Stephen Grossberg

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Stephen Grossberg [1] is a cognitive scientist, neuroscientist, biomedical engineer, mathematician, and neuromorphic technologist. He is the Wang Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems and a Professor of Mathematics, Psychology, and Biomedical Engineering at Boston University.

Because of his interest in how brains give rise to minds, Grossberg's work focuses upon the design principles and mechanisms that enable the behavior of individuals, or machines, to adapt autonomously in real time to unexpected environmental challenges. His research has included fields as vision and image processing; object and event learning and pattern recognition; audition, speech and language; cognitive information processing; reinforcement learning and cognitive-emotional interactions; autonomous navigation; adaptive sensory-motor control and robotics; self-organizing neurodynamics; mental disorders; and neural network technology. Grossberg has published 15 books, over 450 research articles, and has 7 patents.

Grossberg has studied how brains give rise to minds since he took the introductory psychology course as a Freshman at Dartmouth College in 1957. That began his journey in the fields of computational neuroscience, theoretical cognitive science, and brain-inspired technology. In the 1960s, Grossberg introduced the paradigm of using nonlinear systems of differential equations to show how brain mechanisms can give rise to behavioral functions. This paradigm is potentially relevant to the classical mind/body problem, and is the basic mathematical formalism that is used in many biological neural network research today.

1 Professional details
2 Awards
3 Art theory
4 External links

[edit] Professional details

Grossberg founded the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems at Boston University [2]. He is also the founder and Director of the Center for Adaptive Systems and he organized and is currently Director of the NSF Center of Excellence for Learning in Education, Science, and Technology (CELEST: [3]). In addition, Grossberg founded and was first President of the International Neural Network Society (INNS), which grew to 3700 members from 49 states of the United States and 38 countries during the fourteen months of his presidency. The formation of INNS soon led to the formation of the European Neural Network Society (ENNS) and the Japanese Neural Network Society (JNNS). Grossberg also founded the Society's official journal, Neural Networks Neural Networks.

Grossberg has also served as an editor for more than 25 other journals, including Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Cognitive Brain Research, Cognitive Science, Neural Computation, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, IEEE Expert, and International Journal of Humanoid Robotics. He has organized many conferences since the 1970's.

[edit] Awards

Grossberg won the first 1991 IEEE Neural Network Pioneer Award, the 1992 INNS Leadership Award, the 1992 Boston Computer Society Thinking Technology Award, the 2000 Information Science Award of the Association for Intelligent Machinery, the 2002 Charles River Laboratories prize of the Society for Behavioral Toxicology, and the 2003 INNS Helmholtz Award. He is a 1994 Fellow of the American Psychological Association, a 1996 member of the Society of Experimental Psychologists, a 2002 Fellow of the American Psychological Society, and a 2005 IEEE Fellow.

[edit] Art theory

With his wife Gail Carpenter, a mathematician, Grossberg developed the adaptive resonance theory (ART) of neural architecture. The ART theory was practically demonstrated through the ART family of classifiers, and was itself based on insights in neuroscience and behaviour, which he had translated into first order differential equations that governed behaviour of neurons.