Professor Peter Bock is the director of Project ALISA at the George Washington University where he has been a member of the faculty of the Department of Computer Science since 1970. He is credited with the development of Collective Learning Systems Theory, the basis of the ALISA classifier, and has published many papers in this area. His books include The Emergence of Artificial Cognition: An Introduction to Collective Learning, published in 1993 by World Scientific Publishing Company; and Getting it Right: Research Methods for Science and Engineering, published by Academic Press in 2001.
The current research focus of Professor Bock and his team of doctoral students is on the fusion of the ALISA modules and several sophisticated unsupervised clustering algorithms into an adaptive hierarchical engine for high-level symbolic pattern recognition and classification of vision and natural language, both written and spoken. Professor Bock's long-term research objective is the design and implementation of an artificially intelligent being whose cognitive capabilities are on a par with those of human beings.
Carsten is a doctoral student working with Professor Peter Bock in Machine Intelligence and Cognition at the George Washington University. His research focus is the design and development of the new Component Module for the ALISA system, which classifies regions-of-interest in digital transmissive images, such as x-rays, MRI, and PET images. He is currently employed fulltime on Project ALISA as a Senior Research Associate.
Carsten is currently on leave-of-absence from his position at the MITRE Corporation ,where he has been employed since 1985. Currently a Senior Systems Engineer in the Information Technology Center, his previous assignments at MITRE have included the award-winning MITRE Information Infrastructure (MII) intranet and development of models and simulations for the NASA Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS) . Carsten expects to complete his doctorate in May 2008.
Dan Phifer completed his Masters Degree program at The George Washington University in May 2006. During his studies he was employed by Project ALISA as a Graduate Research Assistant. Although no longer a student, Dan is still employed part-time as a Research Associate on Project ALISA's contract with DTRA (Defense Threat Reduction Agency in the DoD) to build JavALISA, a platform-independent Java software package for rapid-prototyping ALISA systems in any application domain. He also is employed part-time at APL (Applied Physics Laboratory), and in January 2008 will leave Project ALISA for a full-time position at APL. His research interests are in adaptive statistical learning and natural language processing.
Alice is a doctoral student working with Professor Peter Bock in Machine Intelligence and Cognition at the George Washington University. Her research focuses on a novel method to accelerate reinforcement learning for Collective Learning Automata. Dubbed Tactic-Based Learning (TBL), it allows an adaptive agent to make smarter decisions about current tasks based on information from tactics that proved successful in previous tasks.
Before beginning his doctoral program at GWU, David was a researcher at the National Institutes of Health/National Human Genome Research Institute , analyzing gene expression micro-array data. This work primarily consisted of using cluster analysis to gain a better understanding of the genes involved with certain kinds of cancer to aid in early diagnosis and gene specific drug treatment development. During his doctoral studies with Professor Bock, he was employed as a Graduate Research Assistant on Project ALISA to work on its contract with (DTRA) (Defense Threat Reduction Agency in the DoD), developing a novel statistical algorithm to identify and estimate the relative concentrations of the radioactive components in a shielded mixture of radioisotopes for use as part of a nuclear-weapons-detection system. His doctoral work was in a different area: the statistical extraction of differentiated polysemous semantic knowledge and syntactic roles of words and phrases in textual databases. He is currently on the research staff at APL (Applied Physics Laboratory).