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Institute Affiliations:
Institute for Neural Computation
California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology
Contact Information:
Email:
gary@ucsd.edu
Personal Home Page
Research Page
| | Garrison W. Cottrell - Professor
Facial recognition, neural networks, human cognition, cognitive science, computational philosophy,
artificial intelligence (AI).
Neural networks are mathematical computer algorithms that mimic how the brain thinks by making
connections between nerve cells or neurons. Such connectionist models of cognitive processes often aim
at creating machines even more skilled than humans at recognizing patterns, for example, to block
fraudulent credit card transactions. Professor Cottrell's application of artificial intelligence (AI)
aims in the opposite direction: neural nets that mimic humans so precisely that they make the same
mistakes. The goal is to understand human psychology. Cottrell's work on facial expression recognition
is shedding new light on affective computing, or the study of human emotion using computers. Cottrell is
also an expert in computational philosophy, or the use of computer simulations to answer philosophical
questions.
Capsule Bio:
Garrison Cottrell joined the UCSD faculty in 1987. He is one of three faculty members running
UCSD's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is Director of UCSD's Interdisciplinary PhD program in
Cognitive Science, and co-principal investigator in the Perceptual Expertise Network. He received his
Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in 1985.
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