Michael A. Arbib
Michael Anthony Arbib (born 28 May 1940) is a computational neuroscientist. He is an Adjunct Professor of Psychology at the University of California at San Diego and professor emeritus at the University of Southern California; before his 2016 retirement he was the Fletcher Jones Professor of computer science, as well as a professor of biological sciences, biomedical engineering, electrical engineering, neuroscience and psychology. Education and career. Arbib was born in England on 28 May 1940, the oldest of four children. His parents moved to New Zealand when he was about 7, and on to Australia when he  was about 9. Arbib was educated in New Zealand and at The Scots College in Sydney, Australia. In 1960 he took a BSc (Hons) at the University of Sydney, with the University Medal in Pure Mathematics. Arbib received his PhD in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1963. He was advised by Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics, and Henry McKean. As a student, he also worked with Warren McCulloch, the co-inventor of the artificial neural network and finite-state machine. Following his PhD, Arbib moved to Stanford for a postdoc with Rudolf E. Kálmán. Arbib spent  five years at Stanford, before moving to become becoming the founding chairman of the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1970. He remained in the Department until 1986, when he joined the University of Southern California. He retired and was granted emeritus status in 2016. Arbib's collected papers from the period 1960 through 1985 are held by the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Research. As both a theoretical neuroscientist and a computer scientist, Arbib argues that by deducing the brain's operating principles from a computational standpoint we can both learn more about  how brains function and also gain tools for building learning machines. With Richard Didday, he developed one of the first winner-take-all neural networks in 1970. More recently, with Giacomo Rizzolatti, the leader of research team that discovered mirror neurons, he proposed an evolutionary link between mirror neurons, imitation, and the evolution of language.