As we celebrate the retirement of Professor Paul Smolensky, we reflect upon his extraordinary contributions.  He was a founding member of the PDP Research Group, which during the 1980s launched neural networks on the path to artificial intelligence (AI) as that term is now understood. In 1993, together with Alan Prince, Smolensky introduced an approach to phonology based upon ranked constraints rather than rewriting rules. This approach, Optimality Theory, has had tremendous impact throughout linguistics and beyond. Smolensky also led the department as Chair from 1997—2000. He successfully advocated for a problem-centered graduate curriculum, landing a series of training grants which provided over 128 student years of support for PhD students in Cognitive Science.  A decade later, the National Research Council ranking affirmed this success, ranking the JHU department #1 in its category.  In 2005 Smolensky received the highest award in the field, the David E. Rumelhart Prize for Outstanding Contributions to the Formal Analysis of Human Cognition. In 2006, he and Géraldine Legendre published the two-volume Harmonic Mind: from neural computation to optimality-theoretic grammar.  This monumental work addresses a wide variety of problems from the vantage point of an Integrated Connectionist/Symbolic cognitive architecture. It leverages tensor product representations (TPRs) which Smolensky developed around 1986 (CU-CS-355-87) and continues to study in his role as a Partner Researcher at Microsoft. Using TPRs (among other techniques) his recent research on Mechanisms of Symbol Processing again integrates numerical and symbolic computation to help understand how modern AI actually works.  

His legacy in academia includes creative synthesis, mathematical invention and a distinctive fun-loving style. Please join us in wishing Professor Smolensky a fulfilling retirement!