I started my long-delayed DPhil (PhD) in October 2005, having decided that I had been with Peace Corps Washington as a technical support specialist for long enough and it was time to move on. I had lived in the UK and attended the University of Sussex twice previously, in 1984-1985 (as an undergraduate exchange student from Northwestern University) and in 1989-1992 (as an MSc student, followed by a two-year research assistantship at the University of Manchester).
I've had pretty much a life-long interest in writing and language, which developed into an interest in the concepts underlying language, which led me into ideas about how we could create computer models of those conceptual structures, which resulted in my present home in philosophy of mind, from whence I hope to make my way back into cognitive science proper.
I submitted my thesis in late September 2010 and successfully defended it 16 March 2011. I was asked to make half a dozen minor corrections; these were approved on 18 May 2011. Since then I have had various short-term appointments and been looking actively for a "permanent" position.
I am an active member of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) and a past speaker at conferences of both the ASSC (Buenos Aires 2016) and Toward a Science of Consciousness (Helsinki 2015, Stockholm 2011, Budapest 2007).
I am an active member in the UK-based Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour. I sat on their board for two years and edited their quarterly journal for one. Over the course of the past dozen years I organized or helped organize half a dozen symposia at their annual convention on the topics of mental health, the cognitive (neuro)science of depression, and computational models of emotion.
I am presently managing editor of the Journal for Intercultural Communication, where I both prepare the manuscripts for simultaneous online publication in HTML and PDF formats and manage the journal website. I am past managing editor of the Journal of Cognitive Semiotics (June 2011-December 2013).
I am a frequent reviewer for Transactions on Affective Computing (where I am also one of the guest editors of an issue in preparation) and Philosophical Psychology. I regularly assist colleagues with preparation of their manuscripts for submission and publication. I am perhaps most well-known within the machine consciousness and ethics of technology communities. My most widely read (over 7,000 reads on Research Gate) and cited (32) first-authored paper “What makes any agent a moral agent? Reflections on machine consciousness and moral agency” lies at the intersection of these two fields.
Over the course of my academic career, I have been an active member of two research groups: the Philosophy of AI in Cognitive Science group at Sussex, University, UK, while I was doing my doctoral studies, and the Centre for Cognitive Semiotics at Lund University, Sweden, during my first postdoctoral years. I was also affiliated for a time with Sussex University’s Centre for Cognitive Science, whose seminar series I ran.
I currently have one paper under review at Mind and Language (on concepts as fundamentally dynamic rather than static entities) and am preparing another for submission to the International Journal of Machine Consciousness (on using contemporary debates within ethics of technology to raise the bar on “acceptable” human behavior).
[resume / CV (English)]
