Professor Terry Regier is appointed honorary doctor at the IT Faculty
Terry Regier, Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of California, Berkeley, USA, is appointed honorary doctor at the IT Faculty for 2023.
Professor Devdatt Dubhashi at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering is the host for Professor Terry Regier during his time as honorary doctor at the IT Faculty, University of Gothenburg.
Summary of the nomination text for the honorary doctorate:
"Terry Regier is one of the world’s leading cognitive scientists and a professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for his research on language acquisition, categorization, and semantics, particularly on the relationship between language and thought. Regier's work involves using experimental and computational methods to understand how humans categorize objects and concepts, and how they use language to communicate these categorizations. He has published numerous articles and books, including The Human Semantic Potential: Spatial Language and Constrained Connectionism (1996).
Beginning in around 2018, his research has directly inspired and led to collaborations with researchers in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), leading to a series of publications presented at CogSci, the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. The research initiated with him lies at the boundary of AI and Cognitive Science and has laid the foundations for a new research direction at CSE in neuro-symbolic AI initiated by Moa Johansson and Devdatt Dubhashi. This research has recently attracted funding from VR and WASP, with plans for collaboration and exchange visits with Terry Regier."