PHILADELPHIA – Aravind Joshi, a cognitive scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, has been named the third recipient of the David E. Rumel-hart Prize for contemporary contributions to the formal analysis of human cognition. Joshi, the Henry Salvatori Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science, Department of Computer and Information Science, School of Engineering and Applied Science, was chosen for his seminal contributions to the formal and computational analysis of language.

The Rumelhart Prize, which includes a $100,000 award, is funded and coordinated by the Glushko-Samuelson Foundation and the Cognitive Science Society. Joshi will receive the honor in Boston in August 2003 at the 25th meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.

"Joshi's work has been the key to the development of effective computational methods for analyzing the structure of sentences," said James McClelland of Carnegie Mellon University, chair of the Rumelhart Prize selection committee. "Among Joshi's core ideas is his Tree Adjoining Grammar Formalism, which has provided the formal machinery necessary for capturing key insights from earlier work on transformational grammar in a computationally tractable framework."

This work has allowed the development of linguistically motivated grammars and powerful natural language parsing programs that work well on a wide variety of texts, as well as more precise formal models of linguistic structure. Joshi has also done important work in the formalization of discourse interpretation and has applied the techniques of mathematical linguistics to the modeling of the structure of biological molecules.

"Aravind Joshi has played a key role, both through his scientific work and his intellectual vision, in the evolution of cognitive science," said Anthony Kroch, chair of Penn's Department of Linguistics, School of Arts and Sciences. "He has taught many of us the importance of building a science in which insights from different disciplines can be combined to build more powerful models of human mental capacities."

Joshi was a founding co-director of the Center for Cognitive Science at Penn. His research contributions have also been recognized with membership in the National Academy of Engineering, the Research Excellence Award of the International Joint Conference of Artificial Intelligence and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

The David E. Rumelhart Prize, named in honor of a Stanford University cognitive scientist best known for his contributions to connectionist or neural network models, acknowledges intellectual generosity and effective mentoring as well as scientific insight.

"Dave Rumelhart gave away many scientific ideas and made important contributions to the work of many of his students and co-workers," said Robert J. Glushko, president of the Glushko-Samuelson Foundation. "Joshi stands out not only for his own contributions but for his exemplary record of leadership in the field."

For further information: http://www.cnbc.cmu.edu/derprize.