‘A Bolt Out of the Blue’ : UCSD Professor Wins Prestigious Grant
When the two-volume book he co-edited, “Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition,” was published last summer, David Rumelhart arranged to attend scientific conferences in the United States and Europe as a kind of academic book tour.
“I was surprised to learn that most people in the field already knew about the book and my work,” said Rumelhart, an expert in the field of artificial intelligence.
Now the 45-year-old Del Mar resident and psychology professor at UC San Diego has been surprised again. Without knowing he was under consideration, Rumelhart was notified that he has received a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, a $275,000, tax-free award spread over five years with no strings attached.
“If you’re an academic, you probably know people who have received a MacArthur, but you don’t let yourself think about it or you could become quite envious,” Rumelhart said. “Part of the charm of the MacArthur award is that they give you no warning. One day you get a phone call and it’s truly a bolt out of the blue.”
Rumelhart’s bolt came last Thursday and the public announcement followed Monday from the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Rumelhart, who had already announced plans to leave UCSD for Stanford, is the sixth UCSD faculty member to win a MacArthur and is among 32 winners nationally this year.
Rumelhart is involved in basic research on how the human brain works, with the goal of creating a computer that can mimic the brain’s ability to attack an intellectual problem with several different “parallel” approaches simultaneously.
Modern computers, with all their wizardry, are generally limited to serial computations, that is, solving problems with a single-track logic, sometimes quite slowly. Much human thought, Rumelhart noted, is not logical but still quite effective in solving problems.
“The degree to which we can learn how brains are programmed might very well allow us to program a parallel computer,” Rumelhart explained in his UCSD office, where a computer terminal shares space with a wall-sized chalkboard filled with mathematical computations.
Mysterious Brain
“My goal is to understand human intelligence, and I do that by building computer models,” he said. “Just how intelligence emerges out of the kind of activity found in the brain, the chemical and electrical elements in the brain, is still very much a mystery. We’re simply trying to understand the process. Our work is highly speculative, highly explorational.”
Rumelhart, the son of a South Dakota printer, is leaving UCSD after 20 years to return to Stanford, where he received his doctorate in psychology and where his two sons, Peter, 20, and Karl, 17, are undergraduates. His wife, Marilyn, will take a leave from her post as director of the clinical training center at San Diego State University.
“The award allows me to push my ideas in directions that are a bit more speculative,” Rumelhart said. “I won’t be as dependent upon conventional sources of funding.”
As co-director of UCSD’s Institute for Cognitive Science, his research has been funded by the Department of Defense’s Office of Naval Research and the Systems Development Foundation, a onetime offshoot of the Rand Corp. The DOD grants will follow him to Stanford.
“We’re not out to make a human out of silicon,” Rumelhart said. “But the better we can understand the details of how the brain works, the greater chance we can develop more powerful conceptual tools to learn even more.
