I describe my profession as cognitive science [1] or cognitive systems architect - my early work was in computational linguistics and knowledge representation (artificial intelligence), my mid career has been in understanding better the limitations of humans and trying to compensate with technology. This has led me to explicit cognitive models (in the Simon and Newell sense), though I should also thank my graduate advisor James Allen for pointing me in the direction of using plans to represent an agents intentions (both at a domain and discourse level), as well as the centrality of Problem Solving (which ultimately stems from Simon's work on GPS).

My main interest at this point is in what some have termed artificial consciousness, though more classically might be just called metacognition. The basic idea isn't to try to capture some philosophical notion of "what it is like to be conscious" but in the Bernard Baars sense, to look at consciousness as a set of functions for which we may create algorithmic implementations. The key idea is that if we abstractly think of an OODA loop as our cognitive system, something needs to monitor that system and adjust it as well as adopt new problems for it to solve. That is, to me, artificial consciousness is less about goal-directed behavior, and more about deciding on what the goals should be. Philosophical autonomy - goals are not imposed but self-selected. So a lot of my interest is also in the idea of "practical ethics" and Deontology.

Think of it as making sure the singularity plays nice with others. (I'm not actually espousing Kurzweil's idea: cells grow on a petri dish until they reach confluence. At some point there are always limits to growth: just because we don't know what they are doesn't mean we should have blind faith that they aren't there... we have no positive examples of "no limits.")

I'm also a firm believer in the innate interdisciplinary nature of the  Cognitive Sciences. So while my "formal" training is in parts of Linguistics and Artificial intelligence (and to a lesser extent Philosophy - at least Philosophy of Language), I try to read and understand what I can on Psychology, Education and Neuroscience as well.

Before going into AI, I was a systems hacker, starting out in database, then in operating systems (in particular, file systems and transaction processing) for parallel machines. Jack of all trades and master of none...

Eventually, links in the left column will allow retreival of my publications and a more complete description of projects I have or am working on. Meanwhile, you can check out my LinkedIn profile.

[1] Actually, I frequently have trouble describing my profession. If I say "cognitive", many folks believe I know nothing about computers, and vice versa. "Scientist" makes folks believe I can't build stuff, and "engineer" makes them believe I follow a lot of processes to build something to order. Sometimes I use Cogputer Scieneer (Cognitive/Computer Scientist/Engineer), but I don't think it helps.