Gary Marcus

Gary F. Marcus (born February 8, 1970) is an American scientist, author, and entrepreneur who is a professor in the Department of Psychology at New York University[1] and was founder and CEO of Geometric Intelligence, a machine learning company later acquired by Uber.[2]

Gary Marcus
Marcus in 2011
Born (1970-02-08) February 8, 1970
Baltimore, MD
NationalityAmerican
Occupationcognitive scientist, author
Websitegarymarcus.com

His books include Guitar Zero, which appeared on the New York Times Best Seller list[3] and Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, a New York Times Editors' Choice.[4] With Jeremy Freeman, he was co-editor of The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World's Leading Neuroscientists.

Biography

Marcus attended Hampshire College, where he designed his own major, cognitive science, working on human reasoning. He continued on to graduate school at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his advisor was the experimental psychologist Steven Pinker. He received his Ph.D. in 1993.

His books include The Algebraic Mind: Integrating Connectionism and Cognitive Science, The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought, Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, a New York Times Editors' Choice, and Guitar Zero, which appeared on the New York Times Bestseller list. He edited The Norton Psychology Reader, and was co-editor with Jeremy Freeman of The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World's Leading Neuroscientist, which included Nobel Laureates May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser.

In 2014, he founded Geometric Intelligence, a machine learning company. It was acquired by Uber in 2016.[2]

Theories of language and mind

Marcus' research and theories focus on the intersection between biology and psychology. How do the brain and mind relate when it comes to understanding language? Marcus takes an innatism stance on this debate and through his psychological evidence has given many answers to open questions such as, "If there is something built in at birth, how does it get there?" He challenged connectionist theories which posit that the mind is only made up of randomly arranged neurons. Marcus argues that neurons can be put together to build circuits in order to do things such as process rules or process structured representations.[5]

Research and written work

Marcus’ early work[6] focused on why children produce overregularizations, such as "breaked" and "goed", as a test case for the nature of mental rules.

In his first book, The Algebraic Mind: Integrating Connectionism and Cognitive Science, Marcus challenged the idea that the mind might consist of largely undifferentiated neural networks. He argued that understanding the mind would require integrating connectionism with classical ideas about symbol-manipulation.[7]

In his second book, published in 2004, The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought, Marcus goes into a more detailed explanation of the genetic support systems of human thought. He explains how a small number of genes account for the intricate human brain, common false impressions of genes, and the problems they may cause for the future of genetic engineering.[8]

In 2005, Marcus was editor of The Norton Psychology Reader, including selections by cognitive scientists on modern science of the human mind.

Marcus' 2012 book, Guitar Zero, explores the process of taking up a musical instrument as an adult.

Publications

Books
  • Marcus, G.; Davis, E. (2019). Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust. Pantheon/Random House
  • Marcus, G.; Freeman, J. (ed.) (2014). The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World's Leading Neuroscientists. Princeton University Press
  • Marcus, G. F. (2012). Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning. The Penguin Press
  • Marcus, G. F. (2008). Kluge: The haphazard construction of the human mind. Houghton Mifflin.
  • Marcus, G. F. (ed.) (2006) The Norton Psychology Reader. New York: W. W. Norton.
  • Marcus, G. F. (2004). The Birth of The Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought. New York: Basic Books.
  • Marcus, G. F. (2001). The Algebraic Mind: Integrating Connectionism and Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Book Chapters
  • Fernandes, K., Marcus, G., DiNubila, J, & Vouloumanos, A. (2005). Generalizing Argument Structure in the Third Year of Life. Proceedings of the 29th BU Conference on Language Development, Volume 1, Cascadilla Press. 192-203. [superseded by Fernandes, Marcus, DiNubila, and Vouloumanos, 2006]
  • Storjohann, R. & Marcus, G. F. (2001) NeuroGene: Integrated simulation of gene regulation, neural activity and neurodevelopment. Proceedings of the 2005 International Joint INNS-IEEE Conference on Neural Networks. In press.
  • Marcus, G. F. (2005). What developmental biology can tell us about innateness and. In The Innate Mind: Structure and Content, P. Carruthers, S. Laurence and S. Stich (eds.). Oxford University Press.
  • Marcus, G. F. (2001). Pasticity and nativism: Towards a resolution of an apparent paradox. In. S. Wermter, J. Austin and D. Willshaw (eds.) Emergent neural computational architectures based on neuroscience. Springer-Verlag, pp. 368–382.
  • Marcus, G. F. (2000). Two kinds of representations. In E. Deitrch & A. Markman (Eds.), Cognitive dynamics: Conceptual and representational change in humans and machines Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
  • Marcus, G. F. (2000). Children's Overregularization and Its Implications for Cognition. In P. Broeder, & J. Murre (eds). Models of Language Acquisition: Inductive and deductive approaches. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp 154–176. [not currently available on-line]
  • Marcus, G. F. (1999). Poverty of the stimulus arguments. In R. Wilson and F. C. Keil, (eds.) Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. Cambridge MA, MIT Press., pp 660–661. [not currently available on-line]
  • Bartke, S., Marcus, G. F., Clahsen, H. (1995). Acquiring German noun Plurals. In D. MacLaughlin & S. McEwen (eds.) Proceedings of the 19th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Boston: Cascadilla Press. [not currently available on-line]
  • Clahsen, H., Marcus, G. F., Bartke, S., & Wiese, R. (1995). Compounding and inflection in German child language. Geert Booij and Jaap van Marle (eds.), Yearbook of Morphology 1995. Kluwer, 1-28. An earlier version appeared in Essex Research Reports in Linguistics, #1, University of Essex, Colchester, England [not currently available on-line].
  • Marcus, G. F., Brinkmann, U., Clahsen, H., Wiese, R., Woest, A., and Pinker, S. (1993). German inflection: The exception that proves the rule. In Proceedings of 15th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. p. 670-675. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. [not currently available on-line]
  • Kim, J. J., Marcus, G. F., Hollander, M. and Pinker, S. (1991). Children's inflection is sensitive to morphological structure. Papers and Reports on Child Language Development 30: 39-46. [not currently available on-line]

Book Reviews
  • Marcus. G. (2004). Programs of the Mind [Review of What is Thought by Eric Baum]. Science. 304, 1450-1451.
  • Marcus, G. F. (2001). A gift for language [Review Pathways to Language by Karmiloff & Karmiloff-Smith]. 89, 456-458. [not currently available on-line]
  • Marcus, G. F. (2000). Review of The Evolution of Mind edited by Denise D. Cummins and Colin Allen. Human behavior and evolution, 21, 63-64. [not currently available on-line]
  • Marcus, G. F. (1997) Review of Exercises in rethinking innateness. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 1, 318-319. [not currently available on-line]
  • Marcus, G. F. (1994). Review of Spoken Language Comprehension: An Experimental Approach to Disordered and Normal Processing by Lorraine Komisarjevsky Tyler. Mind & Language, 9 (1), 102-104. [not currently available on-line]
  • Marcus, G. F. (1993). Review of Morphology and mind: A unified approach to explanation in linguistics by Christopher Hall. Applied Psycholinguistics, 14, 413-416. [not currently available on-line]

References
  1. Gary Marcus - NYU faculty page
  2. "Uber Bets on Artificial Intelligence With Acquisition and New Lab". The New York Times. 2016-12-05. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2018-05-20.
  3. Guitar Zero by Gary Marcus | PenguinRandomHouse.com.
  4. "Editors' Choice - Book Review". The New York Times. 2008-05-04. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2018-05-20.
  5. Edge: Language, Biology, And The Mind
  6. Marcus, G. F., Pinker, S., Ullman, M., Hollander, M., Rosen, T. J., and Xu, F. (1992). Overregularization in Language Acquisition. (Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development). 57 (4, Serial No. 228). SRCD monograph?
  7. Marcus, G. F. (2001). The Algebraic Mind: Integrating Connectionism and Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  8. Marcus, G. F. (2004). The Birth of The Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought. New York: Basic Books.
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