Joseph Goguen writes poetry and collaborates with his wife Ryoko Goguen as lyricist, editor, and producer on musical projects. He studied poetry with Alan Ginsberg and William Merwin, and prose with William Burroughs, at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. He is Editor in Chief of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, a Professor in the Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering, Director of the Meaning and Computation Lab, and a member of the Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition, at the University of California at San Diego, where he teaches sociology of information, semiotics, computer ethics, computational narratology, and new media, among other topics. He has edited three volumes on art and consciousness, and lectured on the philosophy and cognitive science of music at the University of Vienna, the Music and Performing Arts University of Vienna, Keio University in Tokyo, UCSD, and other places. The cantata Zero, Connected, Empty, for which he wrote lyrics, is published by Springer Verlag. Excerpts from the opera Pelican, Fish, Button, for which he is lyricist, with music by Ryoko, have been performed several times at UCSD and elsewhere. He is currently working with David Borgo of the UCSD Music Department on nonlinear dynamical systems models of free jazz improvisation, and he is working with with PhD student Fox Harrell on theory and technology for new interactive media, including illustrative art objects, realized with the GRIOT system.

Joseph was previously a Professor at Oxford and at UCLA, a Senior Staff Scientist at SRI International, and a Senior Member of the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University. He has a BA from Harvard, an MA and Ph.D. from Berkeley, has held various fellowships, and lectured on the philosophy and cognitive science of music, semiotics, metaphor theory, software engineering, logic, sociology of science, consciousness, linguistics, literature, and other topics. He is author or co-author of over 250 publications, and (co-)author or (co-)editor of seven books. He is known for work on fuzzy logic and on algebraic methods in computer science; much more information can be found on his computer science homepage.