Robert Hecht-Nielsen (July 18, 1947–May 25, 2019) was an American computer scientist, neuroscientist, entrepreneur and professor of

electrical Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and motion of matter that has a property of electric charge. Electricity is related to magnetism, both being part of the phenomenon of electromagnetism, as described by ...

and

computer engineering Computer engineering (CoE or CpE) is a branch of electrical engineering and computer science that integrates several fields of computer science and electronic engineering required to develop computer hardware and software. Computer engineers ...

at the

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Insti ...

. He co-founded HNC Software Inc. (NASDAQ: HNCS) in 1986 which went on to develop the pervasive card fraud detection system, Falcon®. He became a vice president of R&D at

Fair Isaac Corporation FICO (legal name: Fair Isaac Corporation), originally Fair, Isaac and Company, is a data analytics company based in Bozeman, Montana, focused on credit scoring services. It was founded by Bill Fair and Earl Isaac in 1956. Its FICO score, a meas ...

when it acquired the company in 2002.

Artificial Neural Networks

As a pioneer in the field of

artificial neural networks Artificial neural networks (ANNs), usually simply called neural networks (NNs) or neural nets, are computing systems inspired by the biological neural networks that constitute animal brains. An ANN is based on a collection of connected unit ...

, he authored the first textbook on the subject, ''Neurocomputing,'' in 1989. Hecht-Nielsen was awarded the INNS Gabor Award and INNS Neural Networks Pioneer Award for his significant contributions to the field. He was among the core group of researchers who proved that neural networks are universal function approximators.

Confabulation Theory

In March, 2005, he held an event to announce "the fundamental mechanism of cognition" dubbe
Confabulation Theory
which he believes is a process of

confabulation (neural networks) A confabulation, also known as a false, degraded, or corrupted memory, is a stable pattern of activation in an artificial neural network or neural assembly that does not correspond to any previously learned patterns. The same term is also applied t ...

. He posits that all actions and thoughts begin as the "winners" of competitions, where confabulations are tested for cogency based on antecedent support. He presented some mathematical models of the proposed mechanism, and some experimental results where software using this system was able to add several words to a stub of a sentence, keeping that stub coherent and, optionally, maintaining some connection to a full input sentence supplied as context. For example, given "But the other ..." the program returns "But the other semifinal match between fourth-seeded ...". Given "Japan manufactures many consumer products." for context, and the same three-word stub, it returns "But the other executives included well-known companies ...". Five pages of such examples were given. He made red, green, and blue-striped medallions to commemorate the event, and had them distributed to the audience along with pamphlets explaining their significance: "This new era, which as yet has no name, will be characterized by the eternal universal freedom from want provided by intelligent machines."

References

External links

UCSD site, with video

UCSD faculty biography
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In memory of Robert Hecht-Nielsen, an influential neuroscientist, entrepreneur and UC San Diego professor
2019 deaths American computer scientists Artificial intelligence researchers University of California, San Diego faculty 1947 births Arizona State University alumni {{compu-scientist-stub