Professor William H. Edmondson
William H. Edmondson, Ph.D. is Honorary Senior Research Fellow and is retired from the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham. William does research in Cognitive Science and Linguistics. He authored The Sequential Imperative, General Cognitive Principles and the Structure of Behaviour and Pulsation period variations in the RRc Lyrae star KIC 5520878.
He recently published a book on Cognitive Science titled The Sequential Imperative: General Cognitive Principles and the Structure of Behaviour.
William is currently working on Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) using data gathered at the Parkes radio telescope, supported by the Breakthrough Listen initiative.
Breakthrough Listen is the largest ever scientific research program aimed at finding evidence of civilizations beyond Earth. The scope and power of the search are on an unprecedented scale.
The program includes a survey of the 1,000,000 closest stars to Earth. It scans the center of our galaxy and the entire galactic plane. Beyond the Milky Way, it listens for messages from the 100 closest galaxies to ours.
The instruments used are among the world’s most powerful. They are 50 times more sensitive than existing telescopes dedicated to the search for intelligence.
The radio surveys cover 10 times more of the sky than previous programs. They also cover at least 5 times more of the radio spectrum — and do it 100 times faster. They are sensitive enough to hear a common aircraft radar transmitting to us from any of the 1,000 nearest stars.
Read some of his publications on SETI:
- The intelligence in ETI—What can we know?, 2012
- Targets and SETI: Shared motivations, life signatures and asymmetric SETI, 2010
- Understanding the Search Space for SETI, 2010
William spent his career working on aspects of cognitive science — covering speech processing, signed language linguistics, and human-computer interaction, and eventually strayed into astrobiology and SETI.
William earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Psychology in 1974 at the Imperial College London. He earned his Master’s Degree of Arts in Theoretical Linguistics in 1986 from the University of Essex, and his Bachelor’s Degree of Science in Physics in 1968 from the University of Surrey.
His research interests are Astrobiology, SETI, Cognitive Science, and Philosophy. William is currently sitting on the Advisory Board of METI, a Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI) program.
Among others, his latest publications on Cognitive Science include:
- General Cognitive Principles: The Structure of Behaviour and The Sequential Imperative, 2010
- Disembedding computers — Interfacing ubiquitous computers, 2009
- Projected Cognition — extending Distributed Cognition for the study of human interaction with computers, 2008
- The Development of a Computational Notation for Synthesis of Sign and Gesture, 2003
- Speech recognition based on syllable recovery, 2003
- Ethical issues in artificial intelligence: distributed affect and the mental health of robots, 2003
Visit his LinkedIn profile, Academia profile page, and ResearchGate profile.
