NN Press Release

[Robert Marks]

IEEE Neural Networks Council PRESS RELEASE

Detroit, Michigan, November 1, 1995 Awards Committee, IEEE 
Neural Networks Council


1995 IEEE Neural Networks Council Pioneer Awards

	Professors Michael A. Arbib and Nils J. Nilsson and Dr. 
Paul J. Werbos have been selected to receive the 1995 IEEE 
Neural Networks Council Pioneer Awards. The awards will be 
presented at the Banquet of the 1995 IEEE International 
Conference on Neural Networks (ICNN '95) in Perth (at the 
Tumbulgum Farm), Western Australia, on Thursday November 30, 
1995.

	The IEEE Neural Networks Council Pioneer Awards have 
been established to recognize and honor the vision of those 
people whose efforts resulted in significant contributions to 
the early concepts and developments in the neural networks 
field. 1995 marks the fifth year for this award, which is to be 
presented to outstanding individuals for contributions made at 
least fifteen years earlier. 

	The three individuals receiving Pioneer Awards in 1995 
are internationally recognized experts who have made pioneering 
technical contributions in the neural networks field.

	The following is a brief description of the awardeesU 
pioneering contributions that the Pioneer Award recognize and 
biographies which provide an overview of the distinguished 
careers of the awardees. 	Michael A. Arbib pioneered 
Neural Networks in Australia, writing his first paper on the 
subject as an undergraduate at Sydney University in 1960, and 
basing his first book (Brains, Machines and Mathematics, McGraw-
Hill 1964) on lectures presented at the University of New South 
Wales.  He is being honored for his pioneering work on the 
development of a system-theoretic approach to the brain in the 
early sixties. He has very actively advanced the notion that the 
brain is not a computer in the recent technological sense, but 
that we can learn much about brains from studying machines, and 
much about machines from studying brains. His thoughts have 
influenced, encouraged, and encharmed many researchers in the 
field of neural networks.

	Arbib is Professor of Computer Science, Neurobiology and 
Physiology, as well as of Biomedical Engineering, Electrical 
Engineering, and Psychology at the University of Southern 
California, which he joined in September of 1986. Born in 
England in 1940, he grew up in Australia  where he had earned 
his B.Sc. (Hons.) from Sydney University. Dr. Arbib  later moved 
to the U.S. where he received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from MIT 
in 1963, spending two years as a Research Assistant to Warren 
McCulloch. After five years at Stanford University (as Assistant 
Professor and later as Associate Professor), he became Chairman 
of the Department of Computer and Information Science at the 
University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1970, and remained in 
the Department until August of 1986. Dr. Arbib currently directs 
a major interdisciplinary project on "Neural Plasticity: Data 
and Computational Structures", integrating studies of the brain 
with new approaches to databases, visualization, simulation, and 
the World Wide Web. His own research focuses on mechanisms 
underlying the coordination of perception and action. The author 
of twenty books and the editor of eleven more, Arbib has most 
recently edited The Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Networks 
(The MIT Press, 1995).

	Nils J. Nilsson is being honored with the IEEE Neural 
Networks Council Pioneer Award for his contribution to the 
theory of perceptrons  and learning machines. His outstanding 
contribution in the area of neural networks was his 1965 
Pioneering book, Learning Machines: Foundations of Trainable 
Pattern-Classifying Systems. This was the definitive book on the 
subject during that decade. The book treated algorithms, 
learning, capacity, and multi-layer perceptrons. He did it in an 
accessible manner, which influenced a whole decade of research 
in the area.

	Nils J. Nilsson is Professor of Computer Science at 
Stanford University. Born in Saginaw, Michigan, in 1933, 
Nilsson's early education was in schools in Michigan and 
Southern California. He attended Stanford University both as an 
undergraduate and a graduate student and earned M.S. and Ph.D. 
degrees in Electrical Engineering, in 1956 and 1958, 
respectively.  For three years after his Ph.D., he served as an 
Air Force lieutenant at the Rome Air Development Center  in 
Rome, New York, where he performed research in radar signal 
detection. Dr. Nilsson joined SRI International (then called the 
Stanford Research Institute) in 1961. His early work there was 
on statistical and neural-network approaches to pattern 
recognition and led to his influential book Learning Machines: 
Foundations of Trainable Pattern-Classifying Systems (McGraw-
Hill, 1965). Later at SRI, Dr. Nilsson became interested in 
broader aspects of AI which led to the publication of his two 
books: Problem Solving Methods in Artificial Intelligence  
(McGraw-Hill, 1971), and Principles of Artificial Intelligence 
(Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, CA 1980). Dr. Nilsson also  led 
the project that developed the SRI robot RShakeyS and served as 
the director of the SRI Artificial Intelligence Center  for the 
years 1980 to 1984. Professor Nilsson returned to Stanford in 
1985 as the Chairman of the Department of Computer Science, a 
position he held until August 1990. At Stanford, he coauthored 
(with Michael Genesereth) the book Logical Foundations of 
Artificial Intelligence (Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, CA 
1987). His most recent research is on the problem of combining 
deliberate (and sometimes slow) robot-reasoning processes with 
mechanisms for making more rapid, stero-typical  responses to 
dynamic, time-critical situations. He is also interested in 
applying machine learning and adaptive computation techniques to 
this problem. Professor Nilsson served as the AI Area Editor for 
the Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery, is on 
the editorial board of the journal Artificial Intelligence, and 
is a past-president and Fellow of the American Association for 
Artificial Intelligence. He is also a fellow of the American 
Association for the Advancement of Science and has been elected 
as a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering 
Sciences. He helped found and is on the board of directors of 
Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc.

	Paul J. Werbos is being honored for doing much of the 
ground work, in the early seventies, for what has now emerged as 
the practical back-propagation learning algorithm in multi-layer 
networks; and for his continuing and sustained contributions to 
current advances in neurocontrol.

	Dr. Werbos holds four degrees from Harvard University 
and the London School of Economics, covering economics, 
mathematical physics, decision and control. His 1974 Harvard 
Ph.D. thesis presented the Rbackpropagation methodS for the 
first time, permitting the efficient calculation of derivatives 
and adaptation of all kinds of nonlinear sparse structures, 
including neural networks; it has been reprinted in its entirety 
in his book, The Roots of Backpropagation (Wiley, 1994) along 
with several related seminal and tutorial papers. In these and 
other more recent papers, he has described how backpropagation 
may be incorporated into new intelligent control designs with 
extensive parallels to  the structure of the human brain. Dr. 
Werbos runs the Neuroengineering program and the SBIR Next 
Generation Vehicle program at the National Science Foundation. 
He is Past President of the International Neural Network 
Society, and a member of the IEEE Control and SMC Societies. 
Prior to NSF, he worked at the University of Maryland and the 
U.S. Department of Energy. He was born in 1947 near 
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His publications range from neural 
networks to quantum foundations, energy economics, and issues of 
consciousness.


Mohamad H. Hassoun Professor Department of Electrical and 
Computer Engineering Wayne State University 5050 Anthony Wayne 
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