« Marcus Chown, Award-Winning Science Writer, 7-26-06 | Main | Dr. Cyrus Mody, Program Manager for Nanotechnology and Innovation Studies in the Center for Contemporary History and Policy at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, 7-26-06 »
July 30, 2006
Dr. Michael Arbib, Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science, University Professor, Professor of Biological Sciences, Biomedical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Neuroscience and Psychology, University of Southern California, 7-26-06
Dr. Michael A. Arbib is the Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science, as well as a Professor of Biological Sciences, Biomedical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of Southern California, which he joined in September of 1986. He has also been named as one of a small group of University Professors at USC in recognition of his contributions across many disciplines.
Professor Arbib grew up in Australia (with a B.Sc. (Hons.) in Pure Mathematics from Sydney University), and received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from MIT in 1963. After five years at Stanford, he became chairman of the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1970, and remained in that Department until his move to USC in 1986.
The thrust of his work is expressed in the title of his first book, Brains, Machines and Mathematics (McGraw-Hill, 1964). The brain is not a computer in the current technological sense, but he has based his career on the argument that we can learn much about machines from studying brains, and much about brains from studying machines. His research has long included a focus on mechanisms underlying the coordination of perception and action. This is tackled at two levels: via schema theory and through the detailed analysis of neural networks, working closely with the experimental findings of neuroscientists on mechanisms for eye-hand coordination in humans and monkeys. Professor Arbib’s group prepared the first computational model of mirror neurons and conducted some of the key initial imaging studies of the human mirror system. He is now developing further insights into the monkey brain and using them to develop a new theory of the evolution of human brain mechanisms which support language.
In addition to his research in artificial intelligence, brain theory and cognitive science, Professor Arbib has been actively involved in theory of computation and system theory. His concern for the social implications of computer science was given textbook expression in Computers and the Cybernetic Society. In 1983 he and Mary Hesse delivered the Gifford Lectures in Natural Theology at the University of Edinburgh, since published as The Construction of Reality, extending schema theory to provide a coherent epistemology for both individual and social knowledge. Professor Arbib was also a founding member of the board of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities at the University of Massachusetts.
Professor Arbib has published 322 scholarly articles and the author or editor of 38 books. His edited volume, The Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Networks (The MIT Press, Second Edition, 2003) is a massive compendium embracing studies in detailed neuronal function, system models of brain regions, connectionist models of psychology and linguistics, mathematical and biological studies of learning, and technological applications of artificial neural networks. Neural Organization: Structure, Function, and Dynamics (The MIT Press, 1998), co-authored with Peter Érdi and the late John Szentágothai, provides a comprehensive view of the working of the brain. Most recently, Jean-Marc Fellous and he have edited Who Needs Emotions: The Brain Meets the Robot (Oxford University Press, 2005), and Professor Arbib has edited Action To Language via the Mirror Neuron System (Cambridge University Press, 2006, in press).
Posted by David Lemberg at July 30, 2006 11:58 AM Return to SCIENCE AND SOCIETY home page