| "What is mind?" "Can we build synthetic or artificial minds?" Think these questions are only reserved for Science Fiction? Well, not anymore. This collection presents a diverse overview of where the development of artificial minds is as the twenty first century begins. Examined from nearly all viewpoints, Visions of Mind includes perspectives from philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, social studies and artificial intelligence. This collection comes largely as a result of many conferences and symposiums conducted by many of the leading minds on this topic. At the core is Professor Aaron Sloman’s symposium from the spring 2000 UK Society for Artificial Intelligence conference. Authors from that symposium, as well as others from around the world have updated their perspectives and contributed to this powerful book. The result is a multi-disciplinary approach to the long term problem of designing a human-like mind, whether for scientific, social, or engineering purposes. The topics addressed within this text are valuable to both artificial intelligence and cognitive science, and also to the academic disciplines that they draw on and feed. Among those disciplines are philosophy, computer science, and psychology.
About the Author Dr Darryl N. Davis is a Lecturer in Department of Computer Science, at The University of Hull. He graduated from the University of Sussex with a BSc in Experimental Psychology. He pursued extra-academic interests for the following twelve years. On returning to academia he graduated from Heriot-Watt University with a M.Sc, in Knowledge Base Systems. The MSc thesis was on data mining in a medical domain. He subsequently worked at the University of St. Andrews on human visual perception, particularly human face recognition. He worked in the Departments of Orthodontics and Medical Biophysics at the University of Manchester for his Ph.D. on the use of AI Architectures for Medical Image interpretation, graduating from Victoria University of Manchester with a Ph.D. in Investigative and Diagnostic Medicine. He worked at the University of Birmingham on a number of projects. This includes time as a Research Fellow with Professor Sloman on a project that addressed a number of issues related to the current text. He has been at the University of Hull since 1999, lecturing in Artificial Intelligence and researching in related areas. In 1999 and 2000 he was invited by the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science to be a visiting professor at the Graduate Institute at Kyoto University. He is a consultant editor (in AI) for Palgrave, MacMillan. His current research interests are diverse with a current focus on architectures for cognition and affect, robotics and agents, machine vision (in particular adaptive segmentation), and data mining. His publications to date include 3 Chapters in Edited Texts, 15 International Journals and 33 International (refereed) Conferences. |