I'm not dead...not yet anyway. Just extremely busy at work, that coupled with 4-5 days of head cold funk and I just haven't felt like blogging.

However, in other news, I'd like to let anybody who doesn't already know that I've been accepted into the Cognitive Science PhD program at The University of Louisiana at Lafayette. I'll be starting August 17th.

So what is Cognitive Science? The ICS web page says:

Cognitive Science is a new discipline, but one with long historical foundations. In brief, this foundation derives from the understanding that people - and by extension other animals - are both capable of cognition (that is, of coming to know something about the environment or the self) and are machines. The status of people as machines is an incontrovertable consequence of evolution; thus we are led to ask what characteristics are necessary to enable non-animate machines to function as cognizers.

The discipline of cognitive science is in the process of emerging out of existing fields. Cognitive science employs the methodological and conceptual tools of psychology, computer science, linguistics, neuroscience, behavioral ecology and philosophy, among those of other disciplines. What forms the core of the new domain is a commitment to the study of cognition per se, and an agreement that it is possible to determine how a mind can work in a physical world.

Close enough for government work. Basically I want to continue working with artificial neural networks and learn more about minds and how they work in the process.

Anyway, normal blogging should resume in the near future.