Understanding Understanding: Natural and Artificial Intelligence (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781466450585)

Robert Kendall Lindsay is Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan and Research Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan Medical School. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in physics from Carnegie Mellon University, a Master of Arts degree in psychology from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon, where his mentors were Artificial Intelligence pioneers Herbert A. Simon and Allen Newell. Later, he did postdoctoral work at Stanford University on a National Science Foundation Science Faculty Fellowship studying logic, computer science, mathematics and philosophy. He was on the faculty of the Psychology Department at The University of Texas at Austin where he established one of the first graduate programs in artificial intelligence. He has held visiting appointments at Stanford University and the University of California at Irvine. He has held research positions at the IBM Corporation Research Center and the New York State Biomedical Research Center. He has been a research consultant to the RAND Corporation, System Development Corporation, General Electric Company, Xerox Corporation Palo Alto Research Center, and Electronic Data Systems, Inc. He was an early contributor to the fields of artificial intelligence and cognitive science. He was the first computer scientist to attempt to create a machine that could understand natural language by having it construct a model of a topic from language input. He has published research on the role of imagery in cognition, natural language understanding and learning, spatial reasoning, diagrammatic reasoning, visual perceptiom, expert systems, genetic algortithms, and medical hypothesis discovery by citation analysis. Lindsay has a long-standing interest in the philosophy of science, especially the foundations of artificial intelligence and psychology, and the prospects and limitations of computational models of intelligence. He has been a student and critic of these subjects and written many reviews and analyses of books and scientific papers about psychology and computational methods.