Jeffrey Elman

Jeffrey Locke Elman (born January 22, 1948) is Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego. He is a psycholinguist and pioneer in the field of neural networks.

Early life

Elman attended Palisades High School in Pacific Palisades, California, then Harvard University, where he graduated in 1969. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1974.

Career

With Jay McClelland, he developed the TRACE model of speech perception in the mid-80s. TRACE remains a highly influential model that has stimulated a large body of empirical research.

In 1990, he introduced the Simple Recurrent neural network (aka 'Elman network'), which is a widely used recurrent neural network that is capable of processing sequentially ordered stimuli.[1] Elman nets are used in a number of fields, including cognitive science, psychology, economics and physics, among many others.

In 1996, he co-authored (with Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Elizabeth Bates, Mark H. Johnson, Domenico Parisi, and Kim Plunkett), the book Rethinking Innateness,[2] which argues against a strong nativist (innate) view on development.

Elman is an Inaugural Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society, and also was its President, from 1999-2000. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the New Bulgarian University, and is the 2007 recipient of the David E. Rumelhart Prize for Theoretical Contributions to Cognitive Science. He is founding Co-Director of the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind[3] at UC San Diego, and holds the Chancellor's Associates Endowed Chair. He was Dean of Social Sciences until June 2014.[4]

References

  1. ↑ Jeffrey L. Elman. Finding structure in time. Cognitive Science Volume 14, Issue 2, Pages 179-211, 1990
  2. ↑ Elman, Jeffrey et al. (1996). Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-55030-X.
  3. ↑ KIBM Website
  4. ↑ Matt Potter (Feb 17, 2014). "Dean in UCSD money "laundering" case to step down". San Diego Reader. Archived from the original on Feb 19, 2014.

External links