Cognitive Science

Although my undergraduate degrees were in Science and Engineering, I realised pretty early on that I was also drawn to the cognitive sciences, psychology, linguistics and statistical models of learning, be they natural language or other — so much so that I sought out a member of the Department of Psychology to supervise my Information Technology honours project in Artificial Natural Language Processing.

Between 2008 and 2009, while still with the Defence Science and Technology Organisation in Australia, I spent a year undertaking postgraduate research in the Adaptive Systems group at the University of Western Australia, during which I investigated models of concept formation and clustering inspired by research in Cognitive Science, focusing on cognitively-feasible models of learning and concept formation.

For the particularly interested amongst you, much of the code I wrote for my post-graduate research is now available over at github.com/dreisiger-metz/research-cogsci-epistemic-network.

Publications

My publications in this field include:

Dreisiger P., Liu W., MacNish C. (2012) Estimating Conceptual Similarities Using Distributed Representations and Extended Backpropagation. In: Cao L., Yu P. (eds) Behavior Computing. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2969-1_8 [Download the PDF]

Dreisiger, Peter and While, Lyndon (eds). Proceedings of the 17th School of Computer Science & Software Engineering Research Conference. Yanchep, WA, 2009. [Download the PDF]

Dreisiger, Peter. Cognitive Approaches to Learning in a Hybrid Semantic Network: An Examination of Localist and Dual Localist-Distributed Representations and their Role in Concept Formation. Unpublished PhD Research proposal, School of Computer Science & Software Engineering, The University of Western Australia, 2008. [Download the PDF]

Dreisiger, Peter. Artificial Working Memory: A Psychological Approach. In Proceedings of the 16th School of Computer Science & Software Engineering Research Conference, pages 14–23, Yanchep, WA, 2008. [Download the PDF]

Dreisiger, Peter. A Statistical Measure of Text Similarity. Unpublished Honours thesis, Department of Computer Science, The University of Western Australia, 1997. [Download the PDF]

(See this for an explanation of why these papers were published by Peter Dreisiger instead of Metz.)