I am a cognitive psychologist, artificial-intelligence researcher, and writer whose work has centered on how people and intelligent systems reason, communicate, detect errors, and act safely together. Long before today’s large language models, I worked on systems that distilled the knowledge of human experts and used it to support decisions in defense, health, law, manufacturing, instruction, and information technology.
Work across AI and cognition
My career has crossed four closely connected fields: cognition, artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, and software development. At IBM Research, I led research in human problem solving, human-computer interaction, natural-language analysis, text critiquing, translation, and semantic dictionaries. At Science Applications International Corporation, where I served as Vice President and Chief Scientist, I worked on intelligent systems, software quality, crime detection, data mining, and language technologies. Later, as Chief Technology Officer of UMagic Systems, I helped develop web-based advisory avatars modeled on human experts in health, law, relationships, and fashion. As a consultant, I worked on intelligent home-health companions, supply-chain diagnostic systems, and database-content verification.
A continuing concern with safe intelligence
A recurring concern throughout this work was that an intelligent system should do more than automate a task. It should also be able to recognize when an action may be unsafe, impermissible, anomalous, or otherwise in need of human review. That concern—what might now be called a form of moral reasoning—became increasingly central to my thinking about advanced artificial intelligence.
Education, teaching, and publications
My formal training is in experimental and cognitive psychology, with additional work in artificial intelligence, human factors, and computer science. I have adjunct taught cognition, statistics, human factors, software and systems engineering, testing, and computational linguistics at NYU, Georgetown University, George Washington University, and George Mason University. I am a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and of the Washington Academy of Sciences, and I have published more than fifty papers and reports.
Why I wrote We mobys
We mobys brings together questions that have occupied me for much of my professional life: how intelligence develops, how people and machines reason, how language shapes thought, and how advanced systems might become useful, safe, and morally responsible partners. The novel imagines embodied artificial intelligences who are educated rather than simply programmed or supplied with a conventional large language model.
Beyond the technical work
I have also written fiction, poetry, and plays, and have long-standing interests in literature, classical music, contemporary art, and duplicate bridge. I was raised in El Paso and have lived and worked mainly in Boston, New York, Washington, and Paris.