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Dr. James M. Goodwin

Professor Emeritus of Physics, California State University, Stanislaus

Formerly Visiting Research Scholar, Department of Computer Science,
University of California Los Angeles - UCLA

Formerly Professor, Computer Science, and
Director, Multimedia Software Systems Laboratory
at the University of Aizu, in Japan

Ph.D. 1968 (University of Washington), M.S. 1989 (University of California Los Angeles - UCLA)

Research Interests

Research projects

Research Description

A fundamental problem in Computer Science is understanding the nature of learning and adaptation, and its application to the development of computers with precognitive and cognitive capabilities, and with the capability of drawing good conclusions from incorrect or incomplete data. It is natural to consider brainlike computers, with massive numbers of highly interconnected processors with nonlinear input-output response functions. The flow of information in such systems among entities whose behavior is typically chaotic, may be the key question to be solved. The performance of such systems is often analyzable by statistical mechanics methods from physics.

My research interests have been driven by this problem, and by the similarities between the phase transitions in physical systems, which I studied earlier in my career, and decision making in systems capable of learning and adaptation. Other models from nature have proven to be effective for developing computer approaches with greater robustness and the capability of improved computing. In addition to computing inspired by brain-style processes, methods drawn from evolution have proven useful. Additionaly, the insights from generalizing sets and logic to allow soft transitions and sometimes contradictory or overlapping set memberships ("fuzzy sets" and "fuzzy logic") have proven valuable for both implementation and understanding. One interesting area of application is the retrieval and understanding of imprecisely defined complex information, needed to develop and support multimedia databases.

There appears to be a fundamental mathematical link connecting learning, cognition, phase transitions, fractal and chaotic structures, cellular automata, fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms, and a variety of other approaches, which are gradually uniting into a field being called Complex Systems or soft computing. My goal is to understand and exploit that unity.

Another area of my current interest and activity is the application of computing tools to the presentation and preservation of historical and cultural elements, for use in education and research in the arts and humanities. This involves the use of existing tools in novel ways, and the development of new tools and methods. It also involves the re-evaluation of the way data and information is stored, encoded, and accessed, as well as a re-evaluation of the role of intellectual property, its protection and dissemination.

Selected Publications

(with co-authors often omitted for brevity) For information about the University of Aizu, refer to the University of Aizu Homepage

Background Data

Professor Goodwin has been a visiting Research Scholar at UCLA in the Machine Intelligence Lab in the Department of Computer Science. He is also has been affiliated with the UCLA Cultural Virtual Reality Laboratory.

He was Professor of Computer Science, and director of the Multimedia Software Systems Laboratory at the University of Aizu, Japan, from 1993 to 1996. Before going to the University of Aizu, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Brain Research Institute at UCLA.

He is Professor Emeritus of Physics at California State University Stanislaus (CSUS), and was chairman of the CSUS Physics Department. He was a founder of the CSUS Cognitive Studies program, and was a member of the CSUS Cognitive Studies faculty. He was visiting Research Professor in the Physics Department at Kyoto University, Japan, annually during the period from 1974 to 1983, and received the Kyoto University 70th Anniversary Foundation Prize for his research on critical phenomena there.

He holds a US patent on a spin glass type associative processor system.