Our cognition and intelligence research group has recently announced and been looking to fill a Post Doctoral research position. The formal announcement, with more details, can be found on the IEEE Career web site. We are looking for a recent Ph.D. graduate with research interest in Intelligent Systems, complex adaptive behavior, as well as some experience with distributed computing. If you know of someone or are interested in the position yourself, you may send me your CV and references. We are considering applications now, and will accept applications for the next 4 weeks or so before making our decision.

Well looks like I’m going to be going to 2 conferences in August here, though I don’t have a paper or talk at either one. From Aug 1-4 I’ll be in beautiful downtown Nashville at the 29th annual Cognitive Science Conference. Then from the 12th to the 17th its off to beautiful Orlando FL for the 2007 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN). Both look exciting, though especially IJCNN (for me) as a lot of our Kozma/Freeman cognitive neurodynamics group are giving talks and tutorials there. If you are going to be to either one, look me up. I’ll probably post a few blogs about impressions, etc. from the conferences while I’m there.

I’ve been doing a bit of planning for my Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class, to be taught this fall. For those who haven’t yet discovered, MIT offers a wonderful resource in their MIT OpenCourseWare. Basically they have opened up many of their courses materials for open and free use. A great resource for educators and self-learners alike, as they state on the site.

Anyway, I think I will be using one of my favorite texts, and the one I used as a student for my AI course (though it has been updated in a second edition), Russel and Norvig’s Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. In my opinion, a very good introduction to the basics, with as the title suggests a modern viewpoint cognizant of the successes, failures, strengths and weaknesses of the standard techniques and algorithms of AI.

noosphere

Main Entry: noo·sphere
Pronunciation: ‘nO-&-”sfir
Function: noun
Etymology: International Scientific Vocabulary noo- mind (from Greek noos, nous) + sphere sphere
: the sphere of human consciousness and mental activity especially in regard to its influence on the biosphere and in relation to evolution

And welcome to my newly born Meta-Cortex. I am finally taking the plunge and starting a wee blog of my own. Most all of my professional content will (eventually) be moved over and available on the static pages of this address. But, in a bit of a change for me, I do plan to offer quite a bit more personal content than I have been used to previously on my own web pages.

Where to begin. I’ll leave lengthy details to my About pages, for those really interested. I am currently an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Texas A&M University here at the Commerce campus. I suspect, like many other blogs, that most of my personal content will tend towards, and generally be related under the broad category of Techno Geekry. I thought I might, just to kick things off and in no particular order, start with a standard old boring favorites list:

• Favorite Book
  • Toughie. Like all academics I can imagine if I were that guy in the Twilight Zone episode, the last guy alive contemplating a life time of solitude in which to catch up on his reading, I too might be deliriously happy (not to mention my eyesight is 20/20 so no worries there). Should I mention Viktor Hugo’s “Les Misérables“, maybe pick Kelso’s “Dynamics Patterns: The Self-Organization of Brain and Behavior“, or perhaps along a similar professional line Hofstadter’s incomporable “Godel, Escher, Bach“? I think perhaps I’ll just settle on something simplier, but probably my all time favorite: “The Tao of Pooh” by Hoff
• Favorite Development System / Computing Platform
  • Let see, I grew up hacking 6502 assembly and Basic on an Apple II computer. (I’ve recently been playing around with virtualization on my Fedora Core 7 laptop, I wonder if there are any 6502/Apple II emulators available?) I am pretty much a hard core Unix/Linux developer, Emacs editor, make system , subversion versioning kinda guy. I must admit, though, I sometimes truly pine for my days as a NextStep developer. Nothing yet has quite matched that feel of simplicity and power, especially the GUI development tools, sigh…
• Favorite Fiction Book
  • I couldn’t really choose just one book, especially since I am a big fiction reader, mostly Science Fiction by nature. I grew up reading the classics, Heinelein, Sturgeon, Niven, Clark. Currently I am quite fascinated with so called post-humanist or singularity SF. Especially check out Vinge’s “True Names” for a great, and still possibly the best example of the genera. Stross is currently blazing away on my fiction radar. Get his “Accelerando” for what I consider his best so far.
• Favorite Movie
  • Wizard of Oz, no wait… Godfather, no wait… Monty Python and the Holy Grail, no wait…
• Favorite Editor
  • Emacs
• Favorite Scientist
  • Alan Turing
• Favorite Color
  • Blue, no yellow. aughhhh (c.f. favorite movie)