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News

 

The Center Receives Research Gift from Cisco Systems

I'm pleased to share this info about a generous research gift the Center has received from Cisco Systems, entirely due to Rachel St. Clair's clever ideas! Rachel is a new PhD in our Complex Systems program (and one of the first PhDs in the Computational Neuroscience track at I-Brain), and a product of our MPCR Lab, with Will Hahn as her dissertation supervisor.

She is now a postdoc at the Center for the Future Mind, and I am obviously excited to be a PI on this as notice, for those who know the history of debates between connectionism and LOT, that unlike Jerry Fodor's famous claims (contra early deep learning advocates) that the brain isn't computational *and​* the brain is symbolic, we have computationalism, symbolicism and deep learningin play here.

Congratulations, Rachel. I look forward to working on this with you. If any Center members share our interests I'm sure Rachel would love to learn about this.

Warm Regards,
Susan Schneider, Ph.D.

 

CENTER FOR THE FUTURE MIND WELCOMES TWO NEW POSTDOCS TO THE SANDBOX, THE LAB AND THE CENTER

It's my pleasure to welcome this year's postdoctoral scholars to the Center for the Future Mind! Welcome, Rachel and Steven! The Lab and Center are very excited to have you working with us in the Sandbox!

- Susan Schneider, Ph.D.

Neuroethics, Intelligence, and Society Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for the Future Mind and Department of Philosophy

Steven Gubka, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral fellow at FAU’s Center for the Future Mind. Gubka earned his doctorate degree in philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. His doctoral research focused on the normative significance of emotion and emotion regulation. Prior to that, he earned a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Oxford and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Arizona (with a minor in cognitive science).

Gubka is investigating the ethics of virtual actions, the value of virtual friendships, and the moral agency of artificial intelligence. He is also interested in how emerging technology, such as emotion detection by artificial intelligence via facial expressions, affects the regulation of our emotions. This is important because of the role that emotions arguably play in our moral knowledge, agency and overall well-being.

Machine Intelligence Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for the Future Mind

Rachel St. Clair, Ph.D., aims to work on AI that produces generally intelligent agents. She received her doctorate degree from the Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences and Graduate Neuroscience Training Program in FAU’s Charles E. Schmidt College of Sciences. St. Clair researches artificial general intelligence, focusing on computer vision, natural language processing, reinforcement learning, complex systems and agent-based modeling. Her current work is focused on understanding the neural basis of consciousness and its relationship to learning, semiconductor solutions for artificial general intelligence and hyperscale computing with her new company, Simuli Inc.