Overview

The David E. Rumelhart Prize is awarded annually to an individual or collaborative team making a significant contemporary contribution to the theoretical foundations of human cognition. Contributions may be formal in nature: mathematical modeling of human cognitive processes, formal analysis of language and other products of human cognitive activity, and computational analyses of human cognition using symbolic or non-symbolic frameworks all fall within the scope of the award.

The prize consists of a certificate, a citation of the awardee's contribution, and a monetary award of $100,000.

The 2008 David E. Rumelhart Prize Recipient

The recipient of the eighth David E. Rumelhart Prize is Shimon Ullman.

Shimon Ullman has developed elegant and well-grounded computational models of vision and carefully compared them to human visual processes. This comparison has led to key insights into the process of perceiving the three-dimensional structure of the world and recognizing objects from vision. The computational models have provided working systems that provide accounts of how humans recognize objects, perceive motion, probe their visual world for task-relevant information, and create coherent representations of their environments. A close consideration of human vision has provided Dr. Ullman with inspiration for his computational models, leading to solutions to difficult problems in artificial intelligence. By learning from natural intelligence, Dr. Ullman has created artificial intelligence systems that would otherwise most likely never have been constructed.

Dr. Ullman did his undergraduate work in Mathematics, Physics and Biology at the Hebrew University in Israel. He received his Ph.D. from M.I.T. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1977, becoming David Marr’s first Ph.D. student. Remaining at MIT he became an Associate Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences in 1981 and Full Professor in 1985. Simultaneously, he took a position in applied mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. While employed at both institutions, he also became the chief scientist at Orbotech, a position he held until 2004. In 1994, he left MIT to be the Head of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science at the Weizmann Institute, where he is now the Samy & Ruth Cohn Professor of Computer Science.