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Obituary
Mike Scaife
Dr Michael Scaife - who died, very
suddenly, on 18 December (aged only 53) - was a highly imaginative cognitive
scientist, and a highly civilized human being. He was an early member and
sometime Chair of Sussex's Cognitive Studies programme in the 1970s/early
1980s, and one of the founders of the School of Cognitive and Computing
Sciences in 1987.
Mike was an enormously stimulating
colleague. His ideas were always acute, typically challenging, usually deep and
often creative. His approach was genuinely interdisciplinary, being informed by
his impressive breadth of scholarship and his technical and experimental
expertise.
Initially trained as a biologist,
he retained his awareness of evolutionary and ethological issues when he
specialized in developmental psychology. His doctoral work was hugely
influential, for (with his supervisor Jerome Bruner) he introduced a new
experimentall paradigm for investigating the cognitive processes of very young
babies. Infancy research would be very different today without that
contribution.
He died at the height of his
powers. In collaboration with Dr Yvonne Rogers, he had initiated a hugely
exciting research programme uniting cognitive and developmental psychology,
artificial intelligence and multimedia. Located within the newly founded COGS
Interact Laboratory, this is theoretically challenging, empirically demanding
and potentially of great practical importance.
The driving question concerns the
use, by young children as well as adults, of various types of representation in
problem-solving, creativity and play. Some of these are internal: lasting or
fleeting data-structures in the minds of the individuals concerned. Others are
external: cultural artifacts of various types, including the many virtual worlds
now being created by multimedia technology.
Mike was raising far-ranging
theoretical questions about how these are used in different social contexts and
how they might be designed to enable novel types of experience in the humans
interacting with them.
These new technologies will affect
our minds at least as much as printing did. Mike's research was starting to
explore the crucial questions about how users of various kinds can - or perhaps
cannot - manage, integrate and exploit the new forms of representation
alongside the old. And, characteristically, he was doing this with flair and
imagination – and his wonderfully wicked sense of humour.
Mike's research programme, thanks
to Yvonne and her Interact colleagues, continues. His presence, to our very
great sadness, is lost. But no one who knew him can ever forget him.
Margaret Boden, Professor of
Philosophy and Psychology, COGS
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Friday 11 January 2002
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