Professor Goguen has a Bachelor degree from Harvard, a PhD from Berkeley, and has also taught at Berkeley, Chicago and UCLA, where he was a full Professor of Computer Science. In 1999 he won a Senior Fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and he has held a Research Fellowship in the Mathematical Sciences at the IBM Watson Research Center where he organized the "ADJ" group, as well as three Senior Visiting Fellowships at the University of Edinburgh. In addition, he was a Distinguished Lecturer in Parallel Computation at Syracuse University, has given distinguished lectures at Glasgow University, UC Irvine, the Universities of Texas, Lisbon, and Illinois, and has given invited addresses at conferences on formal methods, metaphor theory, software re-use, requirements engineering, semiotics, distributed systems, and sociology. His listing in the CiteSeer most cited authors in computer science has varied between about 85 and 120.
Professor Goguen's research interests include software engineering (especially specification, modularization, architecture, requirements and evolution); database integration and ontologies; user interface design; new media art; logic and theorem proving; discourse analysis; sociology of technology and science; cognitive semantics; object oriented, relational and functional programming and their combinations; semiotics; and fuzzy logic. Prof. Goguen is particularly known for his role in founding algebraic specification, including abstract data types and the OBJ language, the module system of which has influenced designs of the Ada, ML, C++, and LOTOS langauges. Theoretical work includes the algebraic theory of abstract data types, initial model semantics, institutions, order sorted algebra, parameterized programming, and most recently, database integration, hidden algebra, and algebraic semiotics. Other research interests include philosophy of art (especially music), computer security, music, poetry, and philosophy of computation.
A current major research project is SEEK, which is constructing a Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge, with emphasis on workflow and ontology languages to help ecologists access, integrate, and process the highly heterogeneous databases that characterize that field. For this project, we are building a GUI-based tool called SCIA, for translating, integrating, and querying data with associated DTD or XML Schema metadata. Two innovations in SCIA are the ability to handle semantic functions and conditions in the same tool as simple matches, and the use of "critical points", where early user input to resolve a difficult match can significantly reduce future user effort.
Another current research project is algebraic semiotics, a novel approach to representation and interaction that has applications to user interface design, new media art, virtual worlds, etc.; it is also the basis for the UCSD courses on interface design (CSE 271 and CSE 171). A related project concerns the value systems that are implicit in information artifacts, such as databases and graphical user interfaces. Case studies have been done on web search engines and mathematical proofs.
A major project with Fox Harrell is developing the Griot system for interactive generative multi-media, to enable narrative, metaphors, images, and so on to be generated on the fly, in response to user input. Its key component is the Alloy algorithm for conceptual blending, based on a formalization of research in cognitive linguistics on how metaphors are constructed, and more generally, how conceptual spaces are combined (see Style as Choice of Blending Principles for details), but using the semiotic spaces of algebraic semiotics rather than the mental spaces of Fauconnier, because of the greater generality given by n-ary relations, structure construcing functions, types, and axioms, allows blending structures at the syntactic and discourse levels, and generating novel metaphors; we also need the greater rigor in order to build computer algorithms. An initial experiment uses the blending algorithm in a system that produces "polypoems," which are very large families of poems having a common theme but varying content and structure, as well as novel metaphors (see Style as Choice of Blending Principles). At the discourse level, one choice is Labov's structural theory of narrative (see Notes on Narrative), but there are other choices, such as the pseudo-haibun structure used in the performance piece The Griot Sings Haibun.
A previous major project designed, built and tested a system to support distributed cooperative software engineering, using distributed cooperative formal methods as a test cases, and using methods from the social sciences to evaluate the results of experiments using the system. The largest component of this system is the Kumo proof assistant, which helps users construct proofs about distributed concurrent systems, and then builds websites that document those proofs; algebraic semiotics was used in designing the interface of these tools. This research was supported as part of a large Japanese national project to build an industrial strength version of Prof. Goguen's OBJ langauge, called CafeOBJ, and by the National Science Foundation.
Work on systems includes the design and implementation of several versions of the OBJ language (the most recent version of which is BOBJ), its first order extension to Kumo, design of the Clear language, and design and supervision of the 2OBJ theorem prover and its application to hardware verification, the OOZE object oriented extension of Z, the TRIM optimizing compiler for OBJ3, the TOOR system for tracing requirements, the Eqlog system for equational programming and verification, the FOOPS declarative object oriented programming and specification language. (The SCIA and Griot systems have already been mentioned above.) Professor Goguen also initiated and led the Rewrite Rule Machine (RRM) project at SRI, to design and prototype a radical massively parallel architecture based on term rewriting.
In 1991 Professor Goguen founded the Centre for Requirements and Foundations at Oxford with significant funding from BT; its goal is to apply methods from both the social sciences and traditional computing science to the early phases of the systems lifecycle, particularly requirements elicitation and analysis. Projects included: a classification and evaluation of existing requirements methods; case studies in the application of techniques from discourse, conversation, and interaction analyses to stock trading, and to a network control center; developing a hypertext system to support tracing design, requirements and rationales; applying ethnomethodology to mathematical proofs; and requirements for a PC based multimedia communication system built by IBM and BT.
Professor Goguen has served as Principal Investigator of many grants and contracts, including a $2,100,000 NSF grant supporting the UCSD Program in Advanced Manufacturing, and the UCSD portion of a $13,200,000 contract from MITI (Japan) for CafeOBJ. He is co-PI of the $2,486,000 UCSD portion of the SEEK grant. Other projects have been funded by the National Science Foundation (US), the Office of Naval Research, BT (British Telecom, UK), the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (UK), the Department of Trade and Industry (UK), Phillips (Netherlands), Fujitsu (Japan), MITI (Japan), and a NSF project supporting cooperative research with computer scientists in Romania.
Professor Goguen is author of over 250 publications, including the books Algebraic Semantics of Imperative Programs with Grant Malcolm (MIT Press, 1997), Software Engineering with OBJ: algebraic specification in action, edited by Joseph Goguen and Grant Malcolm (Kluwer, 2000), Art and the Brain, I, II, III (Imprint Academic, 1999, 2000, 2004), and Requirements Engineering: Social and Technical Issues with Marina Jirotka (Academic Press, 1994); he is co-editor of one other book, and is working on two more. Professor Goguen has graduated a total of 25 doctoral students, including 3 at the University of Chicago, 2 at Stanford, 7 at UCLA, 12 at Oxford, and 2 at UCSD; he is currently supervising several others at UCSD and Oxford. He has served on many programme committees, and consulted for companies that include Sharp, IBM, Hughes Aircraft, and Westinghouse Electric. He serves as an editor for the Cambridge University Press Tracts in Theoretical Computer Science, and eight professional journals, including as Editor in Chief of the Journal of Consciousness Studies. In 1998 he was appointed Editor for the series Consciousness Studies from Imprint Academic.
Professor Goguen has been elected a Fellow of the International Fuzzy System Association, nominated for a Turing Award, and a Fellowship at the Stanford Center for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. He has received awards for two websites that he maintains, a "Creativity Award" from Art & Technology for the UCSD Semiotic Zoo site, and a "Key Resource Award in Formal Methods" from Links2Go for the hidden algebra site.