Jeffrey Locke Elman (January 22, 1948 – June 28, 2018) was an American psycholinguist and professor of cognitive science at the

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Insti ...

(UCSD). He specialized in the field of

neural networks A neural network is a network or circuit of biological neurons, or, in a modern sense, an artificial neural network, composed of artificial neurons or nodes. Thus, a neural network is either a biological neural network, made up of biological ...

. In 1990, he introduced the simple

recurrent neural network A recurrent neural network (RNN) is a class of artificial neural networks where connections between nodes can create a cycle, allowing output from some nodes to affect subsequent input to the same nodes. This allows it to exhibit temporal dynamic ...

(SRNN), also known as the 'Elman network', which is capable of processing sequentially ordered stimuli, and has since become widely used. Elman's work was highly significant to our understanding of how languages are acquired and also, once acquired, how sentences are comprehended. Sentences in natural languages are composed of sequences of words that are organized in phrases and hierarchical structures. The Elman network provides an important hypothesis for how neural networks—and, by analogy, the human brain—might be doing the learning and processing of such structures.Jeffrey L. Elman. Finding structure in time. ''Cognitive Science'', Volume 14, Issue 2, Pages 179-211, 1990

Early life

Elman attended Palisades High School in Pacific Palisades, California, then

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

, where he graduated in 1969. He received his Ph.D. from the

University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

in 1977.The David E. Rumelhart Prize
.

Career

With

Jay McClelland James Lloyd "Jay" McClelland, FBA (born December 1, 1948) is the Lucie Stern Professor at Stanford University, where he was formerly the chair of the Psychology Department. He is best known for his work on statistical learning and Parallel Dis ...

, Elman developed the

TRACE Trace may refer to: Arts and entertainment Music * ''Trace'' (Son Volt album), 1995 * ''Trace'' (Died Pretty album), 1993 * Trace (band), a Dutch progressive rock band * ''The Trace'' (album) Other uses in arts and entertainment * ''Trace'' ...

model of

speech perception Speech perception is the process by which the sounds of language are heard, interpreted, and understood. The study of speech perception is closely linked to the fields of phonology and phonetics in linguistics and cognitive psychology and perc ...

in the mid-80s. TRACE remains a highly influential model that has stimulated a large body of empirical research. In 1990, he introduced the simple

(SRNN; aka 'Elman network'), which is a widely used recurrent neural network that is capable of processing sequentially ordered stimuli. Elman nets are used in a number of fields, including cognitive science, psychology, economics and physics, among many others. In 1996, he co-authored (with Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Elizabeth Bates,

Mark H. Johnson Mark Henry Johnson (born 1960) . . is a British cognitive neuroscientist who, since October 2017, has been Professor of Experimental Psychology and Head of the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the Asso ...

, Domenico Parisi, and Kim Plunkett), the book '' Rethinking Innateness'', which argues against a strong nativist (innate) view of development. Elman was an Inaugural Fellow of the

Cognitive Science Society The Cognitive Science Society is a professional society for the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science. It brings together researchers from many fields who hold the common goal of understanding the nature of the human mind. The society pro ...

, and also was its president, from 1999 to 2000. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the New Bulgarian University, and was the 2007 recipient of the David E. Rumelhart Prize for Theoretical Contributions to Cognitive Science. He was founding co-director of the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind at UC San Diego, and holds the Chancellor's Associates Endowed Chair. He was Dean of Social Sciences at UCSD from 2008 until June 2014. Elman was also a founding co-director of the UCSD Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute, announced March 1, 2018. Elman died of a heart condition on June 28, 2018, at the age of 70.

References

External links

Personal website

UC San Diego Department of Cognitive Science

Center for Research in Language, UCSD

Kavli Institute for Brain & Mind, UCSD

Cognitive Science Society

Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute
{{DEFAULTSORT:Elman, Jeffrey L. 1948 births 2018 deaths 20th-century American psychologists Psycholinguists Speech perception researchers University of California, San Diego faculty Rumelhart Prize laureates Harvard University alumni Fellows of the Cognitive Science Society University of Texas at Austin College of Liberal Arts alumni Linguists from the United States