Peter Bock, Professor Emeritus of Engineering, The George Washington University, Washington DC

Bock received his undergraduate degree in physics from Ripon College in 1962. After completing his graduate studies at Purdue University, he joined the research faculty at IIT Research Institute (IITRI) in Chicago, where he was eventually posted permanently to NASA Headquarters in Washington DC to manage the development of simulation software for the Earth and Lunar orbital missions of the Apollo Program.

Following the success of the first Apollo manned Lunar-landing mission, in 1970 Bock was invited to join the Computer Science faculty at The George Washington University in Washington DC, where he remained for the next 40 years. As well as teaching courses in machine intelligence and cognition, he pioneered the development of Collective Learning Systems Theory, an adaptive statistical learning paradigm for artificial intelligence.

Seeking practical applications of this new paradigm, in 1989 Bock spent a sabbatical at the Research Institute for Applied Knowledge Processing (FAW) in Ulm, Germany, to develop the pattern-classification software engine known as ALISA (Adaptive Learning Image and Signal Processing). From 1990 until his retirement in 2011 he was the Director of Project ALISA at GWU, whose goal was to develop practical applications for ALISA, as well as to extend its capabilities and functionality. Project ALISA was continuously funded from its inception in 1989 until 2011 by several domestic and foreign industrial firms, including Robert Bosch GmbH and Lockheed-Martin (Hubble Space Telescope Project), and several government agencies, including NIST, NASA, and the US Department of Defense (DoD). The project's final research contracts were with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) in support of their counter-terrorism efforts, applying ALISA to locate radiological weapons (e.g., dirty bombs) and to classify objects-of-interest in x-ray images. All in all, the 22-year sequence of ALISA grants and contracts supported 15 graduate students.

Over his 40-year academic career, Bock has published more than 100 refereed papers on CLS theory and ALISA, several book chapters, and presented many colloquia and seminars around the world. In 1993 World Scientific Publishing Company published his book The Emergence of Artificial Cognition: An Introduction to Collective Learning. Then, in recognition of his long experience with designing and conducting complex industrial research projects in a variety of domains, Academic Press (now Elsevier) invited Bock to write a trade reference book about the conduct of scientific and engineering research methods. Consequently, in 2001 his book Getting it Right: R&D Methods for Science and Engineering was published, giving voice to another field in which Bock has a strong interest.

In 2008 Bock chaired an International Advisory Board (IAB) appointed by the Macedonian Government to design and implement a new state-of the-art all-English-speaking undergraduate US-style University for Information Science and Technology (UIST) on Lake Ohrid in southwest Macedonia. The IAB plans included building an entirely green institution, carbon-neutral and self-powered by solar cells, wind turbines, and the vast amount of thermal energy available in the deep cold waters of Lake Ohrid. These plans were approved in the Fall of 2008, and as suggested by Professor Bock the first Rector was appointed: Prof. Dr. Blagoja Samakoski, an accomplished and active Macedonian industrialist. After assuring the stability and growing success of UIST during the first two years of its existence, in July 2011 Rector Samakoski resigned to return to his industrial career.

However, as is unfortunately often the case with insecure and unstable emerging democracies, corrupt officials in the Macedonian government took this opportunity to replace Professor Samakoski and his staff with several such corrupt Macedonian academicians with histories of frequent and serious plagiarism. These histories of fraudulent activities were indeed a nasty prologue to their flagrant academic misconduct at UIST following their appointments in August 2011. The young students suffered terribly under this oppressive and corrupt administration, and the Macedonian government did nothing to remediate the situation, even though comprehensive evidence of these offenses was published repeatedly in the Macedonian press. Potential foreign students and academicians should carefully investigate the current state of affairs at UIST before seeking admission or a faculty position.

Professor Bock retired from GWU in May 2011, but he continues to direct the research of a few doctoral students. He is also still active as a guest lecturer in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, as well as a consultant in his areas of expertise: statistical learning, cognitive science, data visualization, and research methods. His own primary research objective in statisical learning systems has remained unchanged for since 1976: the design and creation of an artificially intelligent being (already named Mada) whose cognitive and emotional capabilities are on a par with humans. He fully expects this objective to be achieved within the next 10 years. He anticipates this event with both excitement and trepidation.