CS establishes the Warren S. McCulloch Collegiate Professorships of Computer Science
CS establishes the Warren S. McCulloch Collegiate Professorships of Computer Science Heading link
This fall, the computer science department funded two new professorships in honor of alumnus Warren Sturgis McCulloch. McCulloch wasn’t a computer scientist but was the first to model neural nets, the foundation for much of AI technology.
McCulloch earned his bachelor’s degree in psychology from Yale University in 1921 and his medical degree from Columbia University. His research focused on experimental neurology, and he studied the areas of the brain responsible for epileptic seizures. After several years working at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, McCulloch returned to Yale University to study the brain’s functional organization, or neurophysiology.
McCulloch joined the University of Illinois Chicago in 1941 to study the relationship between epilepsy and schizophrenia. This work progressed into researching the logic of the central nervous system and how neurons might function.
McCulloch and Walter Pitts, a mathematician, considered the question of whether the nervous system could be considered a kind of universal computing device. In 1943, the duo co-authored the first paper on artificial neural networks, “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity,” published in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics.
Their work, dubbed the McCulloch-Pitts Neuron, is the first mathematical model of a biological neuron.
McCulloch is widely considered a trailblazer. Throughout his distinguished career, he could be considered a psychiatrist, neuropsychologist, cybernetician, poet, and philosopher.
“It should be more well-known than it is that neural networks were invented at UIC,” said Robert Sloan, professor and CS department head.
Today, neural nets form the foundation of much of AI technology, including deep learning and large language models.
By naming these collegiate professorships after McCulloch, UIC is helping publicize this important contribution to the field of computer science.
Barbara Di Eugenio and Michael E. Papka are the first two Collegiate Warren S. McCulloch Professorship recipients. Their investiture ceremony was held on September 20, and their appointments run for five years. These professorships will help Di Eugenio and Papka continue groundbreaking work in their fields.