July 2003
Volume 16, Number 7
Michael Scheessele is an assistant professor in the computer and information sciences department at Indiana University - South Bend. He received a PhD in quantitative and mathematical psychology from Purdue University, a master's in quantitative and mathematical psychology from Purdue, and a master's in computer science from DePaul University.
At the start of the 2002-03 academic year, I became chair of the cognitive science committee at Indiana University - South Bend. This is one of those 'service' committee jobs we all do, and as someone who loves cognitive science, I was happy to take my turn this year. As a second-year Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences, it dawned on me that I had come full circle from where I had started nine years earlier. In late summer of 1993, I worked full-time as a senior software engineer for IDX Systems Corporation and was also trying to wrap up an MS in computer science at DePaul University in Chicago. I had enrolled in DePaul's master's program in order to improve my job situation, as well as for the intellectual stimulation that it provided. I wound up getting hooked on artificial intelligence, which led me to a course in cognitive science, offered by the CS department in the summer of 1993. During one especially interesting lecture, I decided cognitive science was for me - realizing that I was most interested in that artificial intelligence which is psychologically and biologically plausible. So by fall of the following year, I had completed the MS in CS, quit my job, sold my car, given away or stored many of my possessions, and was enrolled in the quantitative and mathematical psychology PhD program at Purdue University (today my workstation is named 'quixote' in honor of fools who mistake windmills for giants).
The transition from a computer science environment to a Psychology environment was not overly traumatic for several reasons:
- Quantitative and mathematical psychology tends to attract people with non-psychology backgrounds.
- My PhD advisor at Purdue, Zygmunt Pizlo, holds both a PhD in electronics from the University of Warsaw and a PhD in psychology from the University of Maryland. (His advice: "Don't settle for just being the best psychologist in a roomful of computer scientists and the best computer scientist in a roomful of psychologists - try to be the best psychologist in a roomful of psychologists and the best computer scientist in a roomful of computer scientists.")
- My master's and PhD committees each included one computer scientist.
The transition from psychology back to computer science has not been difficult either. First, my research is highly interdisciplinary. This research is in the area of vision science, a sub-field of cognitive science. Work in vision science exemplifies the best spirit of interdisciplinary research. For example, AI/computer vision researchers tend to be well-versed in the contributions of Gestalt psychology, while perceptual psychologists often use techniques, like edge detection, that were developed by the AI/computer vision community. In fact, I have used 'pyramid' techniques, commonly found in the computer vision literature, to build a computational model of human perception of partially occluded figures. Second, there are two other computer science professors here working on artificial intelligence problems, and this sometimes naturally leads to discussions involving psychology. Both professors serve with me on the cognitive science committee and this in turn provides additional opportunity to interact with others on campus, from biology, philosophy, physics, and psychology, who are interested in the workings of and connections between mind, brain, and machine.
I occasionally have lunch with various professors in the psychology department. When I first set up my research, they gave me direction on where to obtain equipment and permission to use their labs for my psychophysical experiments. In turn, I offered one of the professors my software for running signal detection experiments. As with my computer science colleagues, I find the psychology people on campus to be a great bunch and hope to collaborate with them in the future.
As for the drawbacks and benefits of being a psychologist in a computer science department, one drawback is due to having been out of mainstream computer science for awhile. Since knowledge turns over quickly in this field, I have had to do a fair amount of 'catch up'. There are also subtle differences between cultures of which one should be aware. For example, computer science people (everywhere) tend to favor publishing in conference proceedings rather than in journals. Some computer science and engineering conferences are as prestigious and selective as journals, but have shorter turnaround time from submission to publication (this allows more papers). As for benefits, I feel that my training as a psychologist enhances my ability to teach computer science courses, because I have insight into how humans process information. (Another benefit of working in a computer science department is that our budget for buying toys seems to be larger than that for other departments!) In closing, I find my position in a computer science department to be flexible enough to allow me to function as both computer scientist and psychologist. Thus, I am quite happy to have come full circle.
