Rumelhart Prize

[Cognitive Science Society]

ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR NOMINATIONS:

THE THIRD ANNUAL DAVID E. RUMELHART PRIZE
FOR CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE
FORMAL ANALYSIS OF HUMAN COGNITION

The recipient of the Third Annual David E. Rumelhart Prize will
be chosen during the first part of 2002. The winner will be
announced at the 2002 Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society,
and will receive the prize and give the Prize Lecture at the 2003
Meeting.

The prize is awarded annually 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
For the Third Annual Prize, the selection committee will continue
to consider nominations previously submitted. The committee
invites updates to existing nominations as well as new
nominations. Materials should be sent to the Prize
Administration address at the end of this announcement. To be
considered in the committee's deliberations for the Third David
E. Rumelhart Prize, materials must be received by Friday, January
11, 2002. Nominations should include six sets of the following
materials: (1) A three-page statement of 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 prize selection committee
considers both the scientific contributions and the scientific
leadership and collegiality of the nominees, so these issues
should be addressed in the statement of nomination.

Previous Recipients and Prize-Related Activities
Previous winners of the David E. Rumelhart Prize are Geoffrey
E. Hinton and Richard M. Shiffrin. Hinton received the First
David E. Rumelhart Prize and delivered the Prize Lecture at the
2001 Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Shiffrin, the
winner of the Second David E. Rumelhart Prize, was announced at
the 2001 Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. He will
recieve the prize and deliver the Prize Lecture at the 2002
meeting.

Funding of the Prize
The David E, Rumelhart Prize is 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 is 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. Members of the
Prize Selection Committee are listed at the end of this
announcement.

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.

Prize Selection Committee

Alan Collins
Department of Learning Sciences
School of Education and Social Policy
Northwestern University

Mark Liberman
Departments of Computer and
Information Sciences and Linguistics
University of Pennsylvania

Anthony J. Marley
Department of Psychology
McGill University

James L. McClelland (Chair)
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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Cognitive Science Society
c/o Tanikqua Young
Department of Psychology
University of Texas
Austin, TX 78712
Phone: (512) 471-2030
Fax:     (512) 471-3053

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