Plenary Session

9:00 -  10:00 a.m
(Pavilion Salons A-B)

Unified Neural Network Designs : The Key to Large Scale Applications and Understanding the Brain

Dr. Paul Werbos, National Science Foundation, Arlington, VA USA

Overview: Simple forms of artificial neural networks (ANNs) have become widely used in niche applications -- credit evaluation, pattern recognition, load forecasting, nonlinear function approximation, etc. For such applications, it is enough to know a few equations and use easy off-the-shelf software. But demanding applications require much more. For example, many people use simple neural adaptive control designs whose theoretical stability guarantees require unrealistic assumptions and do not provide good transient response, but more powerful methods (see presentations at ebrains.la.asu.edu/~nsfadp;Neural Networks IJCNN2003 issue) have proven they can keep physical electric power systems running under disturbances three times as large as ANY of the simpler methods can handle. This talk will discuss how the larger vision of the neural network field -- designing MODULAR general-purpose systems -- has been carried forward in recent years, allowing both (1) an ability to handle larger and larger types of challenges, in a deeply principled mathematical way; (2) the gradual development of designs which could begin to explain the FUNCTIONAL intelligence of the brain as a whole system, something which nonfunctional "computational models" cannot do.

Biography: Paul J. Werbos is best known as the original inventor of backpropagation, as part of his Harvard PhD thesis, which was reprinted in full in his book the Roots of Backpropagation, Wiley 1994, along with his classic 1990 tutorial on backpropagation through time for Proc IEEE. He was one of the three original two-year presidents of the International Neural Network Society, and winner of the IEEE Pioneer Award. He is Program Director for Control, Networks and Computational Intelligence at NSF, which actively seeks more proposals in this area. He has also been active in many cross-cutting funding initiatives; for example, he serves on the Working Group for energy storage and distribution of the interagency Climate Change Technology Program, and coordinated the NASA-NSF-EPRI solicitation on space solar power (NSF 02-098). He is also on the Planning Committee of the Millennium Project of the United Nations University (http://millennium-project.org), and has published a few papers on quantum foundations and technology (see arXiv.org, physics and nonlinear systems). He also has two degrees in economics from Harvard and the London School of Economics