Understand the cogs, understand AI Interviews Publishing and editorial

The future of AI is here and it's cognitive. Robert Hecht-Nielsen, professor at the University of California and vice president of the Fair Isaac Corporation, has discovered the universal mechanism of animal cognition and is now developing automated conversational customer service systems with human-level capabilities for use in a variety of industries. He believes his work may revolutionise the study of neuroscience and change the direction of AI research. Justin Richards, BCS, caught up with him to find out more. Please can you provide a brief overview of what you've been doing since your college years to the present day? Well since I'm old that wouldn't be very brief at all, so I'll summarise if possible! The fact is that since 1968 my passion has been understanding how cognition works and this is something I got into as a mathematics student, so I've always been leaning in the direction of trying to understand these things from underlying mathematical principles as implemented by neural tissue. Now as you know neurons are very difficult to study because the brain is a three dimensional structure and you can't even get at a neuron without destroying the tissue between you and it. Another problem is being able to witness the behaviour of neurons during normal behaviour is extraordinarily difficult. Even though centuries of study have gone on there's still very limited capability to do that. And if you can do it you can only do it for brief periods under extraordinarily tense conditions and you're never quite sure what you're seeing. So this is an important place where theory plays an important role because there is no theory that is definitive, so without a theory to tie it all together it's not very easy to make progress. Basically, I've been focused on building a theory, of course informed by the large number of microscopic facts that exist. So we know a great deal about the brain, and being able to appreciate and understand what is known, that's a process that takes decades in itself. And then being able to use that understanding to craft theories is a further difficulty. Anyway, I've been through all of that and have been working on this.