Jeffrey Elman

Jeffrey L. Elman is Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego. He is a well-known psycholinguist and pioneer in the field of neural networks. With Jay McClelland, he developed the TRACE model of speech perception in the mid-80s. TRACE remains a highly influential model that has stimulated a large body of empirical research.

In 1996, he co-authored (with Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Elizabeth Bates, Mark Johnson, Domenico Parisi, and Kim Plunkett), the book Rethinking Innateness, which argues against a strong nativist (innate) view on development.

In 1990, he introduced the Simple Recurrent Network (aka 'Elman net'), which is a widely-used recurrent neural network that is capable of processing sequentially ordered stimuli. Elman nets are used in a number of fields, including cognitive science, psychology, economics and physics, among many others.

Elman is a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society, was awarded an honorary doctorate from the New Bulgarian University, and is the 2007 recipient of the [[David E. Rumelhart Prize] for Theoretical Contributions to Cognitive Science]. He is founding Co-Director of the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind at UC San Diego and holds the Chancellor's Associates Endowed Chair.

He is is co-directed with Boicho Kokinov of the Central and East European Center for Cognitive Science