THE RUMELHART PRIZE Announcement and Call for Nominations

David E Rumelhart Prize derprize at cnbc.cmu.edu
Thu Sep 7 15:26:14 EDT 2000


ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR NOMINATIONS


THE DAVID E. RUMELHART PRIZE

 FOR CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE

 FORMAL ANALYSIS OF HUMAN COGNITION


The David E. Rumelhart Prize will be awarded biennially to an
individual or collaborative team making a significant contemporary
contribution to the formal analysis of human cognition.  Mathematical
modeling of human cognitive processes, formal analysis of language and
other products of human cognitive activity, and computational analyses
of human cognition using symbolic or non-symbolic frameworks all fall
within the scope of the award.  The Prize itself will consist of a
certificate, a citation of the awardee's contribution, and a monetary
award of $100,000.

           Nomination, Selection and Award Presentation

Nominations for the David E. Rumelhart Prize should be sent to the
Chair of the Prize Selection Committee by December 1 of each even
numbered year, beginning in the year 2000.  Nominations should include
six sets of the following materials: (1) A three-page statement
focusing on the work motivating the nomination, (2) a complete
curriculum vitae and (3) copies of up to five of the nominee's
relevant publications.  Note that the nominee may be an individual or
a team, and in the case of a team, vitae for all members should be
provided.  The awardee will be announced at the meeting of the
Cognitive Science Society in the year following the deadline and will
receive the Prize and deliver the Prize Lecture at the meeting in the
year after that.  Thus, the first prize recipient will be announced at
the Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society in 2001, and the first
Prize Lecture will be given at the meeting of the Society in 2002.

                       Funding of the Prize

The David E, Rumelhart Prize will be funded by the Robert J. Glushko
and Pamela Samuelson Foundation, based in San Francisco.  Robert
J. Glushko is an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley who received a
Ph. D. in Cognitive Psychology in 1979 under Rumelhart's supervision.

                       Prize Administration

The Rumelhart Prize will be Administered by the Chair of the Prize
Selection Committee in consultation with the Glushko-Samuelson
Foundation and the Distinguished Advisory Board.  Screening of
nominees and selection of the prize winner will be performed by the
Prize Selection Committee.  Scientific members (including the Chair)
of the Prize Selection Committee will serve for up to two four-year
terms, and members of this committee will be selected by the
Glushko-Samuelson Foundation in consultation with the Distinguished
Advisory Board.  A representative of the Foundation will also serve on
the Prize Selection Committee.

            David E. Rumelhart:  A Scientific Biography

David E. Rumelhart has made many contributions to the formal analysis
of human cognition, working primarily within the frameworks of
mathematical psychology, symbolic artificial intelligence, and
parallel distributed processing.  He also admired formal linguistic
approaches to cognition and explored the possibility of formulating a
formal grammar to capture the structure of stories.

Rumelhart obtained his undergraduate education at the University of
South Dakota, receiving a B.A. in psychology and mathematics in 1963.
He studied mathematical psychology at Stanford University, receiving
his Ph. D. in 1967.  From 1967 to 1987 he served on the faculty of the
Department of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego.
In 1987 he moved to Stanford University, serving as Professor there
until 1998.  He has become disabled by Pick's disease, a progressive
neurodegenerative illness, and now lives with his brother in Ann
Arbor, Michigan.

Rumelhart developed models of a wide range of aspects of human
cognition, ranging from motor control to story understanding to visual
letter recognition to metaphor and analogy.  He collaborated with Don
Norman and the LNR Research Group to produce "Explorations in
Cognition" in 1975 and with Jay McClelland and the PDP Research Group
to produce "Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the
Microstructure of Cognition" in 1986.  He mastered many formal
approaches to human cognition, developing his own list processing
language and formulating the powerful back-propagation learning
algorithm for training networks of neuron-like processing units.
Rumelhart was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1991 and
received many prizes, including a MacArthur Fellowship, the Warren
Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the APA
Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award.

Rumelhart articulated a clear view of what cognitive science, the
discipline, is or ought to be.  He felt that for cognitive science to
be a science, it would have to have formal theories --- and he often
pointed to linguistic theories, as well as to mathematical and
computational models, as examples of what he had in mind.

Distinguished Advisory Board

William K. Estes
Indiana University
Bloomington, Indiana

Barbara H. Partee
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, Massachusetts

Herbert A. Simon
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Chair, Prize Selection Committee

James L. McClelland
Carnegie Mellon University and
Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Inquiries and Nominations should be sent to

David E. Rumelhart Prize Administration
Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition
115 Mellon Institute
4400 Fifth Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

412-268-4000
derprize at cnbc.cmu.edu

Visit the prize web site at

www.cnbc.cmu.edu/derprize








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