David M. W. Powers

Prof. David M W Powers is Professor of Computer Science and Cognitive Science at Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia, although he has lived, studied and worked in many countries around the world. Prof. Powers has research interests in the area of Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, Health Informatics, Biomedical Engineering and Evolutionary Robotics, and has published hundreds of research papers and a few books related to these interests. David has always been an avid reader of science fiction and fantasy, having his first fantasy story published at 7 years of age (in both print and audio form). He now regards his primary job as turning science fiction into science fact, although As Marti Ward he now also turns science fact into science fiction. His PhD cited erudite literature, movies and TV series involving characters like HAL and Astroboy that learned to be a conscious grounded natural language using entity the same way a human child does. His pseudonymous writing also includes these elements and explains exactly how to produce a conscious AI as well as exploring the associated ethical dilemmas - yes, Isaac Asimov and his Robot and Foundation series were also childhood favourites. He is tickled when his readers liken his fiction to that of Arthur C Clarke or Isaac Asimov. His specific research framework takes Language, Logic and Learning as the cornerstones for a broad Cognitive Science perspective on Artificial Intelligence and its practical applications. Prof. Powers is known as a pioneer in the area of Natural Language Learning, Unsupervised Learning and Evaluation of Learning, and was Founding President of ACL SIGNLL, as well as initiating the CoNLL conference. His previous positions include Telecom Paris, University of Tilburg, University of Kaiserslautern, Macquarie University, as well as work with industry, and commercialization of research through several start up companies.