ABOUT AARON SLOMAN
Emeritus/Honorary Professor of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence
School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, UK
Web: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs
Degrees, jobs, honours, etc.
1956: BSc Maths and Physics, CapeTown.
1957-62:
Rhodes Scholarship Oxford,
then Senior Scholarship St Anthonys Oxford.
1962:
DPhil completed:
Knowing and Understanding,
defending Kant's philosophy of mathematics against fashionable criticism.
Thesis recently digitised:
http://goo.gl/9UNH81
1962-4 Lecturer in Logic and Philosophy of Science, Hull University.
1964-1991: Lecturer, then Reader (1976) then Professor (1984)
at Sussex University,
(1984- awarded two year GEC Research Fellowship at Sussex).
1972-3 SRC Research Fellow, AI, Edinburgh University.
Helped to start AI teaching and research at Sussex 1976, then (mid-1980s)
helped to found School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences (COGS).
1978
The Computer Revolution in Philosophy: Philosophy, science and models of
mind.
Revised edition online free here:
https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/crp/
1983-1991:
Helped to lead development/marketing of Poplog, a program-development toolkit
for teaching and software engineering involving AI. (Sold and supported
internationally by Integral Solutions Ltd.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poplog
With colleagues, added SimAgent Toolkit after coming to Birmingham:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/packages/simagent.html
1991-Present: School of Computer Science Univ. of Birmingham,
Professor of AI and Cognitive Science. (Later Honorary Professor).
1991: Elected fellow of AAAI.
1997: Honorary life fellow of AISB,
1999: Fellow of ECCAI (Now EURAI),
2006: Honorary DSc University of Sussex
My main research themes since about 1959 (after switching from maths to
philosophy):
Attempting to defend Immanuel Kant's claims (1781) that mathematical discoveries
are
(a) non-contingent
Meta-ethics, including the primacy of "better" over "good", "ought", "right",
"should", "best", etc.
Rejection of reward-based theories of value, preference and motivation.
Functions of vision, including uses of visual mechanisms in multi-layer
perception, and mathematical reasoning.
Information processing architectural requirements for intelligent agents
including support for varieties of cognition and varieties of affect, e.g.
pleasure, pain, wanting, fearing, love, grief, mechanisms for motive generation
and motive management: links with stages in evolution of intelligence. Rejection
of reward-based theories of motivation.
The structure of
The space of possible architectures for autonomous agents, including
evolved architectures. Virtual machines and phenomenal consciousness.
The importance of virtual machinery for natural and artificial intelligence.
Evolution of richly structure internal languages used for perception, learning,
reasoning, planning, predicting, explaining, controlling actions, wondering
whether, wanting, fearing, etc., etc. long before use of languages for
communication.
The "Space of possible minds", including minds produced by biological evolution,
for increasingly complex organisms.
Trying to understand why it is so hard to get computers to reason and learn in
the same way as ancient mathematicians, e.g. Archimedes, Euclid, Zeno, etc.,
(and also pre-verbal toddlers and other intelligent animals)
with implications for philosophy of mathematics.
Design of AI environments for learning and teaching.
The main aims of science: discovering what is and isn't possible, what makes
things possible, why some things are impossible. Emphasising the search for
regularities leads to shallow or bad science.
Current work:
Older work:
Maintained by
Aaron Sloman
School of Computer Science
The University of Birmingham