de Garis gets Professorship at Utah State Univ (USU), USA
After the bankruptcy (12 June 2001) of my previous lab, STARLAB I was in panic for 6 weeks before I heard word that I had got another job as an associate professor of computer science at Utah State Universiy (USU), in Logan, Utah, USA. (I had been an adjunct professor there for several years previously, supervising USU M.Sc. computer science students in research). I was very relieved to hear this news. I had had an awful time at Starlab. I lost $100,000 of my own money that I had invested in the company. (The CEO had a good track record prior to that, so I expected to become a millionaire. The dotcom companies were booming at the time, so it seemed like a good bet).
I lost my brain building machine CBM. (See the news item on What happened to the CAM-Brain Machines? and was unable to bring one to USU due to its $0.5M price tag. I lost the million dollar grant that I received from the Brussels government. Once Starlab went bankrupt, the government money returned to the state koffers. So I suffered badly.
I was hired by the CS dept to establish a "Brain Builder Group", with the aim of building artificial brains. I am currently teaching my research assistants how to evolve hardware and to assemble large numbers of evolved circuit modules into artificial brain architectures. My main challenge now is to try to get the several million dollars needed to continue the work. Im hoping to build a next generation brain building machine and a series of artificial brains using it, every 5 years or so. Moore's law necessitates this.
My lecturing at USU is in the general area of artificial intelligence. So far I have lectured a (M.Sc/PhD) course on "Brain Building", (see the power point notes on this website), on artificial intelligence, and will be teaching another new (PhD) course on "Frontiers of Computing" (see the news item Frontiers of Computing Course).
Recently Ive got interested in QEC (Quantum Evolutionary Computing) and have a second research group devoted to this topic. (See the news item de Garis establishes Quantum Evolutionary Computing (QEC) Research Group at USU/CS.).
One of the great attractions of being a professor in the US, is I dont have to put up with Europe's ageist retirement policies, which throw professors out at a fixed age, independently of their performance, a custom I find totally unacceptable. I will probably work till Im around 75. My work is my "jobby".