Jon Reid Oberlander

FRSE Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) is an award granted to individuals that the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's national academy of science and Literature, letters, judged to be "eminently distinguished in their subject". ...

(16 June 1962 – 19 December 2017) was a British philosopher and cognitive scientist who was Professor of

Epistemics Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition (in a broad sense). Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include percep ...

at the School of

Informatics Informatics is the study of computational systems. According to the Association for Computing Machinery, ACM Europe Council and Informatics Europe, informatics is synonymous with computer science and computing as a profession, in which the centra ...

University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh (, ; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in Post-nominal letters, post-nominals) is a Public university, public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Founded by the City of Edinburgh Council, town council under th ...

. He received a BA in

Philosophy Philosophy ('love of wisdom' in Ancient Greek) is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, Value (ethics and social sciences), value, mind, and language. It is a rational an ...

from

Pembroke College, Cambridge Pembroke College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England. The college is the third-oldest college of the university and has over 700 students and fellows. It is one of the university's larger colleges, with buildings from ...

, in 1983 and a PhD in

Cognitive Science Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition (in a broad sense). Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include percep ...

from the

in 1987.

Research

Oberlander described three main strands in his research: intelligent labelling; affect in communication (e.g., in research on

personality type In psychology, personality type refers to the psychological classification of individuals. In contrast to personality traits, the existence of personality types remains extremely controversial. Types are sometimes said to involve ''qualitative'' ...

s in

email Electronic mail (usually shortened to email; alternatively hyphenated e-mail) is a method of transmitting and receiving Digital media, digital messages using electronics, electronic devices over a computer network. It was conceived in the ...

s with Alastair Gill); and multimodal reasoning and communication (e.g., in research with Keith Stenning on

diagrammatic reasoning Diagrammatic reasoning is reasoning by means of visual depiction, representations. The study of ''diagrammatic reasoning'' is about the understanding of concepts and ideas, visualized with the use of diagrams and imagery instead of by natural lan ...

Honours

In March 2016 Oberlander was elected a Fellow of the

Royal Society of Edinburgh The Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) is Scotland's national academy of science and letters. It is a registered charity that operates on a wholly independent and non-partisan basis and provides public benefit throughout Scotland. It was establis ...

, Scotland's National Academy for science and letters, where he served as a member of their Young People's committee.

References

External links

Jon Oberlander's homepage
{{DEFAULTSORT:Oberlander, Jon 1962 births 2017 deaths Oberlander Alumni of Pembroke College, Cambridge British philosophers British cognitive scientists Alumni of the University of Edinburgh Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh