Eric Chown

Professor of Computer Science, Chair of Computer Science Department

Phone 2077253084
Title Professor
Department Computer Science
2nd Title Chair
2nd Department COMPUTER SCIENCE
Work Location 221 Searles Science Building
E-Mail echown@bowdoin.edu
eric chown

Fall 2012

  • Data Structures (CSCI 210)
  • Data Structures (CSCI 210L1)
  • Intermediate Independent Study in Computer Science (CSCI 291)
  • Cognitive Architecture (CSCI 355)
  • Advanced Independent Study and Honors in Computer Science (CSCI 401)

Besides teaching computer science courses in artificial intelligence, cognitive architecture, and computer programming, Eric Chown also enjoys researching the learning in humans and machines. Three years ago, he was awarded a five-year National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Grant that was used to buy specialized robots for his project - "Computational Models of Space in Navigation and Other Domains." Chown has used these robots in several of his classes.

Links

Eric Chown's Personal Page »

Bowdoin Robocup Blog »
Bowdoin Robocup Team Page »
This year the Robocup team that I head finished 10th in the world.

Education

Ph.D. 1994 University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI
M.S 1987 Northwestern University Evanston, IL
B.A. 1985 Northwestern University Evanston, IL

Academic Positions

2004 - Present Bowdoin College Brunswick, ME
Associate Professor of Computer Science, Chair.
1998 - 2004 Bowdoin College Brunswick, ME
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
1994 - 1998 Oregon State University Corvallis, OR
Postdoctoral Assistant in Machine Learning

Competitive Grants and Awards

1985-1986 Walter P. Murphy Fellowship.
1991 Nissan Cognitive Science Fellowship
1991-1992 Rackham Research Partnership Fellowship (with Stephen Kaplan)
1995-1997 CISE Post-Doctoral Associateship in Experimental Science
1999 CBB Mellon Grant (with David Garnick and Clare Congdon)
1999 NSF Grant (with Carrie Phillips and Louisa Slowiaczek).
2001-2006 NSF CAREER Grant

Publications

Journals
Chown, E. (1999). Making predictions in an uncertain world: Environmental structure andcognitive maps. Adaptive Behavior, 1-17.

Chown, E., Kaplan, S. & Kortenkamp, D. (1995). Prototypes, Location and AssociativeNetworks (PLAN): Towards a unified theory of cognitive mapping. Cognitive Science., 19, 1-52.

Kaplan, S., Sonntag, M. & Chown, E. (1991) Tracing recurrent activity in cognitive elements(TRACE): A model of temporal dynamics in a cell assembly. Connection Science, 3, 179206.

Highly Refereed Conferences
Chown, E. (2002). Reminiscence and arousal: A connectionist model. To appear in theProceedings of the Twenty Fourth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.

Chown, E. & Dietterich, T. G. (2000). A divide and conquer approach to learning from priorknowledge. In Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Machine Learning, Langley, P. (ed.), Morgan Kauffman, 143-150.

Chown, E., Jones, R.M., & Henninger, A.E. (2002). An architecture for emotional decision-making agents. To appear in the proceedings of The First Annual Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multiagent Systems

Forbell, E., & Chown, E. (2000).Lexical contact during speech perception: A connectionist model. In Proceedings of the Twenty Second Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.

Henninger, A.E., Jones, R.M. & Chown (2003). Behaviors that emerge from emotion andcognition: Implementation and evaluation of a symbolic-connectionist architecture. To appear in the proceedings of The Second Annual Conference on Autonomous Agents & MultiagentSystem.

Kortenkamp, D. & Chown, E. (1993). A directional spreading activation network for mobilerobot navigation. From Animals to Animats 2, Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior, Meyer, J.-A., Roitblat H. L. and Wilson,S.W. (eds.), MIT-Press.

Book Chapters
Chown, E. & Boots, B. (2005). Learning Cognitive Maps: Finding Useful Structure in an Uncertain World. To appear in Jefferies, M. & Yeap, A. (eds.) Robot and Cognitive Approaches to Spatial Mapping.

Chown, E. (2004) Cognitive Modeling. In Tucker, A. (ed.) Computer Science Handbook. Chapman & Hall.
link will open a PDF - Portable Document Format PDF preprint »

Chown, E. (1999). Error tolerance and generalization in cognitive maps: Performance withoutprecision. In Golledge, R. (ed.) Wayfinding Behavior: Cognitive Mapping and Other Spatial Processes., 349-369 The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Commentaries
Chown, E. (1995). Reverberation reconsidered: On the path to cognitive theory. Behavioral andBrain Sciences, 18, 628-629.

Chown, E., Booker, L.B., & Kaplan, S. (2002). Perception, Action Planning, and CognitiveMaps. To appear in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

Chown, E. & Kaplan, S. (1992). Active symbols, limited storage and the power of naturalintelligence. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 15:3, 442-443.

Other
Chown, E., Foil, G., Work, H., & Zhuang, Y. (2006). AiboConnect: A simple programming environment for robotics. To appear in The proceedings of the 19th International FLAIRS Conference.
link will open a PDF - Portable Document Format PDF preprint »

Henninger, A.E., Jones, R.M. & Chown, E. (2003). Behaviors that emerge from emotion and cognition: Implementation and evaluation of a symbolic-connectionist architecture. To appear in The proceedings of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems '03.
link will open a PDF - Portable Document Format PDF preprint »

Chown, E., (2002). Reminiscence and arousal: a connectionist model. In The proceedings of the 24th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 234-239.
link will open a PDF - Portable Document Format PDF preprint »

Chown, E., Jones, R.M., & Henninger, A.E. (2002). An architecture for emotional decision-making agents. In The proceedings of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems '02.
link will open a PDF - Portable Document Format PDF preprint »

Jones, R.M., Henninger, A.E., & Chown, E. (2002). Interfacing emotional behavior moderators with intelligent synthetic forces. Proceedings of the 11th Computer Generated Forces and Behavior Representation Conference.
link will open a PDF - Portable Document Format PDF preprint »

Henninger, A.E., Jones, R.M. & Chown, E. (2002). Behaviors that emerge from emotion and cognition: A first evaluation. Proceedings of the '02 Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation, and Education Conference (I/ITSEC). Orlando, FL.
link will open a PDF - Portable Document Format PDF preprint »

Henninger, A.E., Jones, R.M., & Chown, E. (2001). A symbolic-connectionist framework for representing emotions in computer generated forces. Proceedings of the '01 Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation, and Education Conference (I/ITSEC). Orlando, FL.
link will open a PDF - Portable Document Format PDF preprint »

Chown, E., & Dietterich, T.G. (2000). Learning in the Presence of Prior Knowledge: A Case Study Using Model Calibration. Poscript preprint. In the Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Machine Learning. P. Langley (ed.). Morgan Kauffman, pp 143-150.

Chown, E. (2000). Gateways: An approach to parsing spatial domains. In ICML-2000 Workshop on Machine Learning of Spatial Knowledge, 1-6.

Jones, R.M., Chown, E., & Henninger, A.E. (2001). A hybrid symbolic-connectionist approachto modeling emotions. In AAAI Fall Symposium Emotional and Intelligent II: The Tangled Knot of Social Cognition. Technical Report FS-01-02. AAAI Press.

Henninger, A.E., Jones, R.M., and Chown, E. (2002). Behaviors that emerge from emotion andcognition: A first evaluation. In the Proceedings of Interservice/Industry Training Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC), 2002. Orlando, FL

Henninger, A.E., Jones, R.M., and Chown, E. (2001). Framework for Attention, Cognition andEmotion in Synthetic Forces. In the Proceedings of Interservice/Industry Training Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC), November 26-29, 2001. Orlando, FL.

Chown, E. (1994). Consolidation and Learning: A Connectionist Model of Human Credit Assignment. Doctoral dissertation. The University of Michigan.

Invited Talks

(1999). Fitting Parameters to Ecosystem Models Using Surface Data. 1999 NASA Workshop onData Mining and Data Fusion

(2000). Gateways: An approach to parsing spatial domains. ICML-2000 Workshop on MachineLearning of Spatial Knowledge.

Students

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Supervision
Eric Forbell, Bowdoin College
Anthony Roy, Bowdoin College
Doug Vail, Bowdoin College
Byron Boots, Bowdoin College
Masters Committee Membership
Russ Tedrake, University of Michigan

Curriculum vitae in PDF formPDF»