Jobs and Research Activities
His first job was teaching philosophy at the University of Hull (1962-4), after which he moved to Sussex University where he worked on philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, meta-ethics, and various topics in epistemology. In 1969, he learnt about Artificial Intelligence ("AI") from Max Clowes, then a leading UK AI researcher in vision. As a result of this, he published a paper distinguishing 'Analogical Representations' from 'Fregean representations' and criticising the Logicist approach to AI as too narrow. It was presented at IJCAI in 1971, then reprinted in the Artificial Intelligence Journal).
Subsequently, he was invited by Bernard Meltzer to spend a year (1972–1973) in Edinburgh University where he met and worked with many leading AI researchers. When he went back to Sussex he helped to found what eventually grew into COGS, the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences. He managed the development team between 1980 and 1991.
During that period he published The Computer Revolution in Philosophy: Philosophy science and models of mind (which emphasised the importance of architectures) in 1978, and other papers on various aspects of philosophy and AI, including work on the analysis of 'ought' and 'better', on vision on emotions in robots, on forms of representation and other topics. Much of his energy was devoted to developing new kinds of teaching materials based on POP-11 and Poplog for students learning AI and Cognitive Science.
In 1991, after 27 years at Sussex, he was offered a research chair in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham, where he started the Cognition and Affect project (later on the Free Open Source Poplog Portal) and is presently still on it. He officially retired in 2001, but continues working full time.
Read more about this topic: Aaron Sloman
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