Herbert Jaeger (University of Groningen)

Herbert Jaeger studied Mathematics in Freiburg (Germany), specialising in formal logic, then did a PhD in Bielefeld (Germany) in the classical AI (knowledge-based systems) group of Ipke Wachsmuth, became interested in dynamical systems modeling in cognitive science, which led to a postdoc in the autonomous robots research team of Thomas Christaller at the (then) German National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science (GMD) in Sankt Augustin (Germany), where he drifted towards signal processing, machine learning and recurrent neural networks, which in turn allowed him to found and head a GMD research unit on modeling intelligent dynamical sytsems (MINDS).

Then from 2001 to 2019 he served as professor in the CS department of the private Jacobs University Bremen (Germany) where he taught theoretical CS and machine learning and continued thinking about mathematical modeling of cognitive dynamics, which somehow got him pulled into the fields of unconventional computing, which in turn in 2010 led to an appointment at the University of Groningen, where he still uses the name MINDS for his group and where he still teaches machine learning but now dedicates all thinking efforts to unconventional computing theory, often in collaboration with mathematicians, theoretical computer scientists, materials scientists, microchip engineers, cognitive scientists and AI/machine learning colleagues. His lifetime dream is to develop a mathematical language for modeling general information-processing dynamical systems.