A major new prize in the amount of $100,000, named for human cognition pioneer David Rumelhart, a founder of the University of California, San Diego's Department of Cognitive Science, has been established.
The David Rumelhart Prize, which will be awarded biennially to an individual or collaborative team making a significant contribution in the field of human cognition, will be hosted by the Cognitive Science Society and is being funded by the Robert J. Glushko and Pamela Samuelson Foundation, based in San Francisco.
"It is a great pleasure for me to help the field of cognitive science and honor my mentor Dave Rumelhart, " said Robert Glushko, president of the Glushko-Samuelson Foundation. Glushko, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, received a Ph. D. in cognitive psychology in 1979 from UCSD, under the supervision of Rumelhart.
Rumelhart, who left the UCSD faculty in 1989 to go to Stanford, and retired in 1998 with a degenerative brain condition, made major contributions to the formal analysis of human cognition. He is perhaps best known for his work at UCSD in the development of parallel distributed processing, a novel approach to human cognition based on the use of simulated neural networks. Rumelhart also made use of mathematical models and symbolic formalisms for representing knowledge, and explored the use of a grammatical framework for characterizing the structure of simple stories. He felt that formal methods were essential to cognitive science as a discipline, making it a science rather than a branch of the humanities.
In 1983, Rumelhart-then a member of the UCSD psychology department-and his UCSD colleague Don Norman founded a program in cognitive science, an emerging discipline that brought together strands of computer science, psychology, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and philosophy. In 1987, Norman, until recently a computer design guru with Apple Computers and now co-leader of a distributed learning start-up, became the founding chair of UCSD's new Department of Cognitive Science, the first department of its kind in the world. Since 1979, when the campus hosted the first meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, UCSD has been known as one of the leading centers for the study of cognitive science. Research in the department is very diverse, ranging from the study of artificial intelligence and neural network models to language acquisition and development.
According to Jeff Elman, the acting chair of the UCSD Department of Cognitive Science and current president of the Cognitive Science Society, it is hoped that the new prize will help to bring more visibility and attention to the many outstanding scientists whose work has given us a greater understanding of human thought processes and the workings of the human mind.
A distinguished group of scientists will serve to advise the Glushko-Samuelson Foundation on the Rumelhart Prize, the first of which will be awarded at the Cognitive Science Society's annual meeting next year in Edinburgh. The advisory board will include: Herbert A. Simon, Nobel Laureate; William K. Estes, a recipient of the President's National Medal of Science; and Barbara H. Partee, a distinguished linguist and philosopher. The prize selection committee will be chaired by James L. McClelland, a long-time collaborator of Rumelhart's, who is now the co-director of the Center for Neural Basis of Cognition in Pittsburgh.
"This prize will not only commemorate Rumelhart's own contributions," said McClelland, "it will also reinforce the scientific values that Rumelhart exemplified. I hope it will also help to inspire others to follow in Rumelhart's footsteps and create novel formal frameworks that contribute to our understanding of human thinking."
Additional information about the David Rumelhart Prize can be obtained at http://www.cnbc.cmu.edu/derprize or by contacting James McClelland (412) 268-3157, Robert Glushko (415) 564-3790, or Jeff Elman (858) 534-1147.