Peter Asaro

Peter Asaro earned his PhD in the History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science at the University of Illinois, where he also earned his Master of Computer Science degree. He has worked at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA), the Beckman Institue for Advanced Science and Technology, and Iguana Robotics, Inc. in the areas of virtual reality, artificial intelligence, machine learning, robot vision, and neuromorphic robotics. His dissertation was on the relationships between brain modeling, the development of early computers, and cybernetic and cognitive theories of mind in the period from the 1940s to the 1960s. Much of this work focused on the Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Ilinois, 1958-1972, and the cyberneticians W. Ross Ashby and Heinz von Foerster who worked there.

Since completing his PhD, Asaro has been a postdoc at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, where he made documentary films of scientific practices of ESA space scientists. He also held a postdoc in Digital Humanities at Umea University in Sweden.

In addition to continuing his work on the history of cybernetics and brain modeling, he has begun a new project on the ethical design of autonomous systems and the nature of responsibility in distributed socio-technical systems, focusing particularly on the use of robots for police and military applications.

Neil Van Leeuwen

Neil Van Leeuwen started off as a classicist and moved to being a philosopher; he flirts with falling into the category of "cognitive scientist." He studied classics at University of Pennsylvania for his
BA, classics at Oxford for his M.St., and philosophy at Stanford for his PhD. His published work focuses on the nature of self-deception.

His current research examines what belief is from a philosophical/psychological standpoint and seeks to contrast belief with other cognitive attitudes, like imagining and hypothesis. The aim of this work is to develop a conception of believing as a mental state that will be theoretically useful to philosophers, social scientists, and artifical intelligence researchers.