I work at Oakland University as a professor of engineering. I started studying engineering much later than many engineering students, because my original intention had been to become a linguist. I enlisted in the U.S. Army right after high school and spent a year studying Russian at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey California. The Army eventually sent me to the University of Washington, where I received my first degree'a B.A. in Slavic Languages and Literature. Eventually, I served four years in Germany as a Signal Officer, and rose to become a Captain.

After my Army commitment ended, I decided to leave the Army and study engineering so that I could better understand the communications equipment I had been working with. Five years later I received a second degree: a B.S. in Electrical Engineering. In the meantime, I worked several fishing seasons as a Russian translator on Soviet trawlers up in the Bering Sea. I wrote a book about that experience in 'Hair of the Dog: Tales from a Russian Trawler.' I also spent a season as the radio operator at the South Pole Station, where Philip and I met. (We were married as soon as we got 'off the ice,' in New Zealand.) With the B.S.E.E. degree in hand I settled down and spent three years working as a instrumentation and controls engineer at a laser research and development firm near Seattle.

We moved to the Detroit area in 1989. I worked for Ford briefly, and then began doing consulting and attending Oakland University part time while our children were small. I received a M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1995, and a Ph.D. in Systems Engineering in 1998. I was hired after my graduation to continue on as a professor at Oakland University.

Since then, I've become interested in learning about people and places using an out-side-the box perspective--as you can tell from my books. I feel compelled to explore ideas and concepts in writing--thank goodness I have a family that's forgiving of my compulsion!

Dr. Terrence Sejnowski received his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University and was a postdoctoral fellow in neurobiology at Harvard Medical School before joining the faculty at Johns Hopkins, where he was a Professor of Biophysics. He moved to La Jolla and now holds the Francis Crick Chair at The Salk Institute for Biological Studies and is also a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, San Diego, where he is a director of the Institute for Neural Computation. He is also the President of the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) Foundation, which organizes an annual conference that was the incubator for deep learning and was attended by 26,000 researchers in 2020. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine, and the National Academy of Inventors, one of only three living scientists elected to all four national academies.

Sejnowski pioneered learning algorithms for neural networks in the 1980s. He co-invented the Boltzmann with Geoffrey Hinton and developed Independent Component Analysis (ICA), a machine learning algorithm for blind source separation of mixed signals. His book, The Deep Learning Revolution, explores the origins of modern artificial intelligence and its convergence with discoveries in brain science. He also pioneered computational neuroscience and his book with Patricia Churchland, The Computational Brain, showed how distributed population activity in neural network models gives rise to behavior. His Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), Learning How to Learn with Barbara Oakley, is based on learning in brains and has been viewed by over 3 million learners in over 200 countries, and their new book, Uncommon Sense Teaching, is aimed at helping teachers navigate the complexities of two major learning systems in brains.