Garrison W. Cottrell is a Professor of Computer Science and 
Engineering at UC San Diego. He is Director of the 
Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Cognitive Science at 
UCSD, and the Director of the Temporal Dynamics of Learning 
Center, an NSF-sponsored Science of Learning Center 
involving 40 PI's at 17 institutions in three countries. He
is also a founding PI of the Perceptual Expertise Network. 

Professor Cottrell's main interest is Cognitive Science, in
particular, building working models of cognitive processes
and using them to explain psychological or neurological
processes. In recent years, he has focused upon unsupervised
feature learning (modeling precortical and cortical coding),
face & object processing, visual salience, and visual
attention. He has also worked in the areas of modeling 
psycholinguistic processes, such as language acquisition,
reading, and word sense disambiguation. He received his
PhD. in 1985 from the University of Rochester under James
F. Allen (thesis title: A connectionist approach to word
sense disambiguation). He then did a postdoc with David
E. Rumelhart at the Institute of Cognitive Science, UCSD,
until 1987, when he joined the CSE Department.