I’ve worked the last 40 years on increasingly sophisticated computer and robot models of biological learning and evolution. I started doing the computer modeling of behavior purely for its scientific value based on my advanced studies in the mathematics of animal/human learning, but it quickly proved to have a lot of practical applications. It came to be called a neural network with reinforcement learning, one of several invented independently in the early 1980s that is now arguably the most important technology in the world. Dr. Ken Stephens and I founded BehavHeuristics, Inc., and applied the network to produce one of the earliest, largest, and most successful applications of neural networks—a system that interacted with 200 analysts at USAir to earn $140 million its first year. We also did complex scheduling and other dynamic resource allocation problems (yes, including stock markets ;-).Robots offered a much tougher test of behavioral theory than computers alone, since they prevent inadvertent cheating that’s often the case with unembodied computer models. I’ve focused on complex sensory inputs (vision, hearing, touch, proprioceptive, recurrence, etc.) that are needed for the real world, and on complex (high degrees of freedom) motor control. The emerging term for biologically-based robots is biorobots or biobots. Ideas from behavioral psychology have enabled the development of language with understanding (including human-like speech recognition and articulatory speech synthesis), imitation, creativity, and thinking. Another major focus is modeling the powerful combination of learning and evolution as they combine in nature. I’ve done much of the robotics work with Dr. Betsy Constantine, and the two of us have developed materials explaining these ideas to lay people. We developed robot control for complex robots in natural environments for a major government agency for 4 yearsIn the past I’ve been a professor at SUNY-Stony Brook, West Virginia University, and Universidad Catolica in Bogota, Colombia. I've been an advisor to the National Science Foundation, author of 70 publications/conference presentations, and editor and reviewer for several professional journals.Specialties: Complex mobile robotics, biorobotics, neural networks, reinforcement learning, language acquisition, speech recognition