Born in Que Que (now KweKwe), Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), 1936.
Went to school there till 1948 then school (SACS) and university (UCT) in Cape Town (BSc mathematics and physics 1956 1st class).
Obtained a Rhodes Scholarship (SACS constituency) and went to Oxford (Balliol College, October 1957) to study mathematics, but eventually got seduced by philosophy (DPhil 1962), after toying with mathematical logic for while. (I had Hao Wang as supervisor while studying mathematical logic.)Started teaching Philosophy at Hull University in 1962, then moved to Sussex in 1964. Spent 1972-3 in Edinburgh as Senior Visiting Fellow, and was converted to "AI as the best way to do philosophy." I learnt more in that year than in any other year of my life since about the age of 4.
Returned to Sussex October 1973, and helped (with Max Clowes, Margaret Boden, Alistair Chalmers, then later Steve Hardy, John Lyons, Gerald Gazdar and others) to develop a Cognitive Studies Programme in the School of Social Sciences which eventually grew into the Sussex School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences.
Over the years dabbled in vision (still the hardest unsolved problem in AI, psychology and neuroscience), the study of forms of representation, motivation and emotion, architectures for complete agents, how to build a mathematician (starting at about age 3 or 4), design of robots of the future, the evolution of powerful learning strategies, trajectories in design space and niche space, philosophical problems about mind, emotion, mathematics, causation and meta-ethics, and good ways to teach novices programming and AI, and how to make computing the centre of a new kind of liberal education -- an aim defeated by politics, economics, lack of suitable teachers, and the presence of the wrong sorts of computer systems in schools all round the world. (For more see my 'my-doings' file.)
Managed the development of Poplog, a sophisticated multi-language design environment, for exploratory research and teaching in AI and Cognitive Science, at Sussex between about 1980 and 1991. (Find out more about it here). Poplog won a UK Government 'SMART' award for Integral Solutions Ltd around 1991 for achieving sales of over 5 million dollars, and was the basis of the development of Clementine among other commercial products. Poplog is now a free open source system still under development. I manage the web site.
Obtained grants for development of poplog, and for research in vision. In 1984-6 was awarded a GEC Research Fellowship (not applied for). Grants from the Renaissance Trust supported my work.
After 27 years at Sussex wanted a change so moved to Birmingham in 1991. Foolishly agreed to be Head of School of Computer Science at first, but in 1994 became a research professor, working on architectures for human-like agents, a toolkit for exploring agent architectures, motivation, emotion, vision, causation, consciousness and related problems. Passed UK academic retirement age in 2001 but have continued to work full time, living on pension!
Grants from the UK Joint Council initiative on HCI, the Renaissance Trust, DERA, the Leverhulme trust, and the EC have supported this research. More recent grants are listed here
1991: Elected fellow of American Association for AI,
(now renamed "Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence") in 1991. (Second wave of elections.).1997: Elected honorary life fellow of AISB (one of the first group of three fellows: the other two were Margaret Boden, Sussex University, Alan Bundy Edinburgh University). See http://www.aisb.org.uk
1999: Elected fellow of ECCAI, European Coordinating Committee on AI (first wave). See http://www.eccai.org/c/fellows?sort=year
2004: Made Fellow of WIF: The World Innovation Foundation
Note added 20 May 2007 (replacing note of 19th April 2007), revised 30 May 2007:
The fellowship was temporarily revoked in April 2007, because I raised a question about whether WIF was a hoax, as suggested by one contributor to a wikipedia administrative discussion. By raising the question I hoped to find answers. However the only person who noticed my question was the chief executive of the WIF, who was not pleased. (However, he later withdrew his condemnation.)My (not very extensive) investigations eventually led me to the conclusion that WIF was not a hoax. Moreover, the unsupportable claim on various web sites that WIF had been founded by Glen Seaborg in 1992 which had raised suspicions in the minds of some wikipedia discussants was not made by WIF itself, but by careless press officers in universities, who compressed two separate facts
(a) that WIF was founded (with a different name) in 1992, andSo, I conclude that WIF is real and serious, and it is not a hoax, but as far as I can tell, most of its fellows are proud to be elected, but do nothing for WIF, and at this stage it is not clear to me that WIF is capable of realising its lofty ambitions, and the extent of its influence is not clear. However the Chief Executive, Dr. David Hill and others associated with the WIF do give invited addresses at some conferences, though these do not seem to attract much attention. That conclusion was reached after a short period of intermittent investigation in the first third of 2007, and may have been based on insufficient evidence. Even if true at the time, it could prove misleading if the WIF manages to attract more resources for its work.
(b) that Glen Seaborg became its founding President when the name was changed, at his suggestion, in 1996, shortly before he died.For more details see the comments in my 'blogspot' web site.
2005: Became a member of UK Computing Research Commmittee (UKCRC)
2006: Honorary DSc, awarded July 2006 Sussex University.
Wrote The Computer Revolution in Philosophy in 1978 (freely available online since Sept 2001, with some notes and comments added from time to time).Most of this web site can be seen as a sequel to that book including published papers, technical reports, discussion notes and slide presentations in various directories:
My talks (research and teaching presentations)For the time being I maintain the Free Poplog distribution directory, at http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/freepoplog.html
Research talks, latest first
the Cognition and Affect papers
the IJCAI'01 tutorial with Matthias Scheutz.
Papers in the CoSy research project
Miscellaneous online papers, discussion notes and postings to bulletin boards, etc.
This includes the SimAgent ToolkitSince about November 2002 I have been actively involved in helping to define and promote one of the research Grand Challenges selected by the UKCRC, namely Grand Challenge 5 (GC5): Architecture of Brain and Mind, a project aiming to replicate an interesting subset of a typical human child (not a new-born infant) in a robot.
My home page has further details.
Prompted by Linda World, who was kindly writing an article about me for the 'Histories and Futures' section of IEEE Intelligent Systems (published in July/August 2005), I recently started to assemble a hypertext summary of things I've done and worked on.
All of this would not have been possible without Alison (Shown at an orienteering event).
Maintained by
Aaron Sloman
Last updated 12 Jun 2008
