Getting It Right

Bock received an undergraduate degree in Physics from Ripon College in 1962. After finishing his graduate studies, he was invited to join the NASA Apollo Program, eventually becoming the director for orbital simulation software development at NASA headquarters in Washington DC.

Following the first successful manned Lunar landing in 1969, Bock was invited to join the faculty of the Department of Computer Science at The George Washington University in Washington DC, where he designed and established a new graduate curriculum in Artificial Intelligence. Over the next 20 years he added courses in neurophysiology, cognitive science, and statistics to the computer science core in the graduate AI curriculum to expand the biological knowledge and sharpen the empirical perspective of the students.

During a two-year stay as a visiting professor at the University of Ulm in Germany, Bock and his graduate students developed the well-known Project ALISA (Adaptive Learning for Image and Signal Analysis) with generous funding from the large German corporation Robert Bosch GmbH. For the next 20 years, research funding from both industry and government enabled the support of many doctoral students who are now successfully employed in academia or industry around the world. Bock has published more than 100 scholarly papers and book chapters, as well as presented many invited lectures in government, academia, industry, NGOs, and special public events.

Bock retired from George Washington University in 2011, but still directs several doctoral students as well as his own research in AI, focusing primarily on natural language processing, high-dimensional clustering, and the development of artificial neural networks that acquire and apply their knowledge using adaptive statistical learning. In 2012 he was invited to present a TED Talk, which can be viewed at www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpNfy7AUPl4. His long-term research objective has remained unchanged for the last 45 years: the construction of an artificially intelligent being (already named Mada) whose intellectual and emotional capabilities are on a par with human beings.

In addition to his technical background, Bock speaks German and is broadly educated in the humanities and social sciences, with special interests in theatre, music, the history of technology and culture, and neonatal developmental psychology. He lives with his wife in downtown Washington DC in the midst of a jumble of computers and musical instruments.