Dr. Leonid Perlovsky is a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

, Principal Research Physicist and Technical Advisor at the United States Air Force Research Laboratory, Hanscom Air Force Base

Hanscom Air Force Base

Hanscom Air Force Base is a United States Air Force base located approximately south-southwest of Bedford, Massachusetts. The facility is a joint use civil airport/military base with Hanscom Field which provides general aviation and charter service.The host unit at Hanscom is the non-flying...

. He is the Program Manager for United States Department of Defense

United States Department of Defense

The United States Department of Defense is the U.S...

 (DOD) Semantic Web

Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is a collaborative movement led by the World Wide Web Consortium that promotes common formats for data on the World Wide Web. By encouraging the inclusion of semantic content in web pages, the Semantic Web aims at converting the current web of unstructured documents into a "web of...

 program and leads several research projects, including cognitive algorithms, modeling of evolution

Evolution

Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...

 of languages and cultures. From 1985 to 1999, he served as Chief Scientist at Nichols Research, a $0.5B high-tech DOD contractor leading the corporate research in intelligent systems, neural network

Neural network

The term neural network was traditionally used to refer to a network or circuit of biological neurons. The modern usage of the term often refers to artificial neural networks, which are composed of artificial neurons or nodes...

s, sensor fusion

Sensor fusion

Sensor fusion is the combining of sensory data or data derived from sensory data from disparate sources such that the resulting information is in some sense better than would be possible when these sources were used individually...

, and automatic target recognition

Automatic Target Recognition

Automatic target recognition , is the ability for an algorithm or device to recognize targets or objects based on data obtained from sensors....

.

He served as professor at Novosibirsk State University

Novosibirsk State University

Novosibirsk State University was founded in May 1959 in the USSR by Soviet academicians Mikhail Alekseevich Lavrentiev, Sergei Lvovich Sobolev and Sergey Alekseyevich Khristianovich in a program of establishing a Siberian branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences...

 and New York University

New York University

New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...

, and participated as a principal in commercial startups developing tools for text understanding, Biotechnology

Biotechnology

Biotechnology is a field of applied biology that involves the use of living organisms and bioprocesses in engineering, technology, medicine and other fields requiring bioproducts. Biotechnology also utilizes these products for manufacturing purpose...

 , and financial predictions. His company predicted the market crash following September 11, 2001 attacks

September 11, 2001 attacks

The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks (also referred to as September 11, September 11th or 9/119/11 is pronounced "nine eleven". The slash is not part of the pronunciation...

 a week before the event, detecting activities of Al-Qaeda

Al-Qaeda

Al-Qaeda is a global broad-based militant Islamist terrorist organization founded by Osama bin Laden sometime between August 1988 and late 1989. It operates as a network comprising both a multinational, stateless army and a radical Sunni Muslim movement calling for global Jihad...

 traders, and later helped SEC tracking the perpetrators. He is invited as a keynote plenary speaker and tutorial lectures worldwide, and has published more than 320 papers and 10 book chapters and authored three books, including “Neural Networks and Intellect,” Oxford University Press, 2000 (currently in the 3rd printing) and two books with Springer in 2007,. Dr. Perlovsky organizes conferences on Computational intelligence

Computational intelligence

Computational intelligence is a set of Nature-inspired computational methodologies and approaches to address complex problems of the real world applications to which traditional methodologies and approaches are ineffective or infeasible. It primarily includes Fuzzy logic systems, Neural Networks...

, Chairs IEEE Boston Computational Intelligence Chapter. He serves as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks,
, Editor-at-Large for "New Mathematics and Natural Computation" and Editor-in-Chief for “Physics of Life Reviews.” He received National and International awards including the IEEE Distinguished Member of Boston Section Award 2005; the US AFRL Charles Ryan Memorial Award for Basic Research, 2007; Gabor Award 2007, the top engineering award from the International Neural Network Society; and John McLucas Award 2007, the highest US Air Force Award for science.

His current research interests include modeling mechanisms of the mind: neural modeling fields

Neural modeling fields

Neural modeling field is a mathematical framework for machine learning which combines ideas from neural networks, fuzzy logic, and model based recognition. It has also been referred to as modeling fields, modeling fields theory , Maximum likelihood artificial neural networks .This framework has...

, knowledge instinct, aesthetic emotions

Aesthetic emotions

Aesthetic emotions refer to emotions that are felt during aesthetic activity and/or appreciation. These emotions may be of the everyday variety or may be specific to aesthetic contexts. Examples of the latter include the sublime, the beautiful, and the kitsch...

, emotions of beautiful and sublime, language

Language

Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...

, language evolution, emotionality of languages, language and cognition, evolution of languages and cultures, symbols as psychological processes, evolution of consciousness, languages, and cultures, mathematical intelligence and art, role of music in evolution of consciousness and cultures, science and religion, including scientific explanations for the role of sacred

Sacred

Holiness, or sanctity, is in general the state of being holy or sacred...

 values in the workings of the mind, and why religious teleology

Teleology

A teleology is any philosophical account which holds that final causes exist in nature, meaning that design and purpose analogous to that found in human actions are inherent also in the rest of nature. The word comes from the Greek τέλος, telos; root: τελε-, "end, purpose...

 is equivalent to scientific causality

Causality

Causality is the relationship between an event and a second event , where the second event is understood as a consequence of the first....

.

Knowledge instinct

The term knowledge instinct is used by Leonid Perlovsky in his book Neural Networks and Intellect: Using Model-Based Concepts and other publications. In his works the knowledge instinct is recognized on a par with other ‘basic instincts’ such as instincts for food and procreation as a fundamental mechanism of human functioning.

The existence of knowledge instinct follows from the cognitive and neural evidence about the brain mechanisms of perception and cognition, as well as mathematical modeling of these mechanisms. The conclusion that that humans and higher animals have a special instinct

Instinct

Instinct or innate behavior is the inherent inclination of a living organism toward a particular behavior.The simplest example of an instinctive behavior is a fixed action pattern, in which a very short to medium length sequence of actions, without variation, are carried out in response to a...

 responsible for cognition

Cognition

In science, cognition refers to mental processes. These processes include attention, remembering, producing and understanding language, solving problems, and making decisions. Cognition is studied in various disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science...

 is supported by several other researchers. Harry Harlow

Harry Harlow

Harry Frederick Harlow was an American psychologist best known for his maternal-separation and social isolation experiments on rhesus monkeys, which demonstrated the importance of care-giving and companionship in social and cognitive development...

 discovered that monkeys as well as humans have the drive for positive stimulation, regardless of satisfaction of drives such as hunger; David Berlyne discussed curiosity

Curiosity

Curiosity is an emotion related to natural inquisitive behavior such as exploration, investigation, and learning, evident by observation in human and many animal species. The term can also be used to denote the behavior itself being caused by the emotion of curiosity...

 in this regard; Leon Festinger, introduced the notion of cognitive dissonance

Cognitive dissonance

Cognitive dissonance is a discomfort caused by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance. They do this by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and actions. Dissonance is also reduced by justifying,...

 and described many experiments on the drive of humans to reduce dissonance; John Cacioppo

John Cacioppo

John T. Cacioppo is the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. He founded and is Director of the University of Chicago Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience and the Director of the Arete Initiative of the Office of the Vice President for...

 discussed the need for cognition

Need for cognition

The need for cognition, in psychology, is a personality variable reflecting the extent to which people engage in and enjoy effortful cognitive activities....

.

The fundamental nature of this mechanism is related to the fact that our knowledge always has to be modified to fit the current situations. One rarely sees exactly the same object: illumination, angles, surrounding objects are usually different; therefore, adaptation-learning is required. A mathematical formulation of the mind

Mind

The concept of mind is understood in many different ways by many different traditions, ranging from panpsychism and animism to traditional and organized religious views, as well as secular and materialist philosophies. Most agree that minds are constituted by conscious experience and intelligent...

 mechanisms (Perlovsky 2006) emphasizes the fundamental nature of our desire for knowledge. Virtually all learning and adaptive algorithms (tens of thousands of publications) maximize correspondence between the algorithm internal structure (knowledge in a wide sense) and objects of recognition. Concept-models that our mind uses for understanding the world are in a constant need of adaptation. Knowledge is not just a static state; it is in a constant process of adaptation and learning. Without adaptation of concept-models humans and animals will not be able to understand the ever-changing surrounding world. They will not be able to orient ourselves or satisfy any of the bodily needs. Therefore, animals must have an inborn need, a drive, an instinct to improve knowledge, called the knowledge instinct. Mathematically it is described as a maximization of a similarity measure between the knowledge stored in mind concepts and the world as it is sensed by sensory organs.

Dynamic logic (neural)

In Perlovsky's works , the term Dynamic logic refers to a logic-process describing mathematically a fundamental mind mechanism of interactions between bottom-up signals and top-down signals as a process of adaptaton from vague to crisp concepts. Dynamic logic is a mathematical description of the Knowledge instinct. This mathematical formulation results in practically usable algorithms used within the framework of Neural modeling fields

Neural modeling fields

Neural modeling field is a mathematical framework for machine learning which combines ideas from neural networks, fuzzy logic, and model based recognition. It has also been referred to as modeling fields, modeling fields theory , Maximum likelihood artificial neural networks .This framework has...

. It resulted in significant improvement in solving classical problems (such as detection, recognition, tracking

Tracking

Tracking can refer to:*Tracking , separating children into different classes according to their academic ability*Tracking, in computer graphics, a vital part of match moving...

, fusion

Sensor fusion

Sensor fusion is the combining of sensory data or data derived from sensory data from disparate sources such that the resulting information is in some sense better than would be possible when these sources were used individually...

) and new approaches to recently emerging problems (such as text search engines and cultural prediction models).

Physics of the mind

Physics

Physics

Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...

 occupies itself with the search for basic laws, a few universal “first principles” describing a wealth of observed phenomena. Perlovsky aims to develop a physical theory of the mind and suggests the first principles that need to be included in such theory. Among “the first principles” of the mind are interactions between bottom-up signals and top-down signals, which is the essence of perception

Perception

Perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of the environment by organizing and interpreting sensory information. All perception involves signals in the nervous system, which in turn result from physical stimulation of the sense organs...

, cognition

Cognition

In science, cognition refers to mental processes. These processes include attention, remembering, producing and understanding language, solving problems, and making decisions. Cognition is studied in various disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science...

, and concept

Concept

The word concept is used in ordinary language as well as in almost all academic disciplines. Particularly in philosophy, psychology and cognitive sciences the term is much used and much discussed. WordNet defines concept: "conception, construct ". However, the meaning of the term concept is much...

 formation; mechanisms of instincts and emotions, and their interaction with cognition

Cognition

In science, cognition refers to mental processes. These processes include attention, remembering, producing and understanding language, solving problems, and making decisions. Cognition is studied in various disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science...

; the knowledge instinct driving cognition

Cognition

In science, cognition refers to mental processes. These processes include attention, remembering, producing and understanding language, solving problems, and making decisions. Cognition is studied in various disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science...

, higher mental abilities, and related aesthetic emotions

Aesthetic emotions

Aesthetic emotions refer to emotions that are felt during aesthetic activity and/or appreciation. These emotions may be of the everyday variety or may be specific to aesthetic contexts. Examples of the latter include the sublime, the beautiful, and the kitsch...

. Dynamic logic mathematically describes these mechanisms.