Edge Rewrite
restyle Source code View original
// HTMLRewriter · presentation

This page was redesigned at the edge.

Cloudflare fetched the original article and streamed it through HTMLRewriter to apply an entirely new visual system without rebuilding the source page.

Jump to content

Michael A. Arbib

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Michael Arbib)

Michael A. Arbib
Born
Michael Anthony Arbib

England
EducationUniversity of Sydney
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Known forBrains, Machines and Mathematics
Scientific career
InstitutionsUniversity of Southern California
Academic advisors
Norbert Wiener

Michael Anthony Arbib (born May 28, 1940) is a brain theorist and cybernetician whose work has been influential in theoretical neuroscience, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, robotics, mathematical systems theory, language evolution, and the conversation between architecture and neuroscience. Since his retirement from the University of Southern California in 2016, he has held emeritus status there as University Professor, Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science and Professor in biological sciences biomedical engineering, electrical engineering, neuroscience, and psychology.

Early life and education

[edit]

Arbib was born in England on May 28, 1940, the oldest of four children. His parents moved to New Zealand when he was 7, and on to Australia when he was 9.[1] and attended high school at The Scots College in Sydney, Australia.[2] In 1960 he took a BSc (Hons) at the University of Sydney,[3] with the University Medal in Pure Mathematics.[4] However, his interests shifted from pure mathematics to the fields of cybernetics and automata theory, and his honours thesis on Turing Machines, Finite Automata, and Neural Nets was published in 1961.[5]

Arbib received his PhD in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1963.[6] He was advised by Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics, and Henry McKean.[1][6] As a student, he also worked with Warren McCulloch, the co-inventor of the artificial neural network and finite-state machine.[1] In the summer of 1962, he gave a series of lectures at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, which became the basis of his first book, Brains, Machines and Mathematics. The book was reviewed in Scientific American by Jacob Bronowski, and translated into Chinese, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, and Spanish.[7]

Career

[edit]

Following his PhD, Arbib had a postdoc at Imperial College with Jack Cowan, during which he wrote a foundational paper linking automata theory and system theory,[8] conducted a lecture tour of Europe and the Soviet Union,[9] and lectured for a term at the University of New south Wales before moving to Stanford for a postdoc with Rudolf E. Kálmán.[10]

Arbib spent five years at Stanford, before becoming the founding chairman of the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1970. He remained in the department until 1986, when he joined the University of Southern California. He retired and was granted emeritus status in 2016.[11]

Arbib's collected papers from the period 1960 through 1985 are held by the University of Massachusetts Amherst.[12] while those from 1986 through 2016 are held at the University of Southern California.[13]

As part of this work, he established the Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics while at the University of Massachusetts.[14] This work helped connect distributed artificial intelligence with biologically grounded brain theory, particularly through computational models of vision, navigation, and action. His influence was recognized by the naming of an adaptive robot as the ARBIB (Autonomous Robot Based on Inspirations from Biology).[15]

Awards and honors

[edit]

References

[edit]
  1. 1 2 3 Anderson, James A.; Rosenfeld, Edward (2000). "10 Michael A. Arbib". Talking Nets: An Oral History of Neural Networks. MIT Press. pp. 211–238. ISBN 978-0-262-51111-7.
  2. ↑ Arbib, Michael A. (2012-12-06). Brains, Machines, and Mathematics. Springer Science & Business Media. ISBN 978-1-4612-4782-1.
  3. ↑ Gold Medal The Atlas[dead link]
  4. 1 2 3 "Michael Arbib". modha.org. Retrieved 2026-06-17.
  5. ↑ Arbib, Michael (1961). "Turing Machines, Finite Automata and Neural Nets". Journal of the ACM. 8 (4): 467–475. doi:10.1145/321088.321089. ISSN 0004-5411.
  6. 1 2 Michael A. Arbib at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  7. ↑ Bronowski, J.; Arbib, Michael A. (1964). "Review of Brains, Machines, and Mathematics, ArbibMichael A." Scientific American. 210 (6): 130–134. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0664-130. ISSN 0036-8733. JSTOR 24931534.
  8. ↑ Arbib, M.A. (1966). "Automata theory and control theory—A rapprochement". Automatica. 3 (3–4): 161–189. doi:10.1016/0005-1098(66)90011-2. ISSN 0005-1098.
  9. ↑ Arbib, M. A. (1966). "A partial survey of cybernetics in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union". Behavioral Science. 11 (3): 193–216. doi:10.1002/bs.3830110307. ISSN 0005-7940. PMID 5327620.
  10. ↑ Anderson, James A.; Rosenfeld, Edward (2000-02-28). Talking Nets: An Oral History of Neural Networks. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-51111-7.
  11. ↑ "Professor Emeritus Michael Arbib: A Remarkable Trajectory - 55 Years of Brains, Machines and Mathematics (event announcement)". Department of Computer Science. University of Southern California. 12 September 2016. Retrieved 25 October 2020.
  12. ↑ "Michael A. Arbib Papers". Library. University of Massachusetts Amherst. Retrieved 26 October 2020.
  13. ↑ "Collection: Michael A. Arbib papers | Archives at USC". archives.usc.edu. Archived from the original on 2024-07-28. Retrieved 2026-06-17.
  14. ↑ "TRN's View from the High Ground: USC's Michael Arbib". www.trnmag.com. Retrieved 2026-06-17.
  15. ↑ Damper, R.I.; French, R.L.B.; Scutt, T.W. (2000). "ARBIB: An autonomous robot based on inspirations from biology". Robotics and Autonomous Systems. 31 (4): 247–274. doi:10.1016/S0921-8890(99)00122-0. ISSN 0921-8890. Archived from the original on 2024-04-20.
  16. ↑ "Best Information Science Book Award Recipients". Association for Information Science and Technology | ASIS&T. Retrieved 2026-06-17.
  17. ↑ "Elected AAAI Fellows". AAAI. Retrieved 2026-06-17.
  18. ↑ "Past Recipients - IEEE Computational Intelligence Society". cis.ieee.org. Archived from the original on 2024-06-22. Retrieved 2026-06-17.
  19. ↑ "2026 Michael A. Arbib: Computer Science Researcher – H-Index, Publications & Awards". Research.com. Retrieved 2026-06-17.
  20. ↑ "INNS Award Recipients". www.inns.org. Retrieved 2026-06-17.
  21. ↑ "UWB Awarded Honorary Doctorates to Two Prominent Scientists". info.zcu.cz. Retrieved 2026-06-17.
[edit]
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Michael_A._Arbib&oldid=1365562419"