Meet the Professor
Professor Howard’s passion for science and technology began during his childhood. He pursued his interests in his studies and in 2000 while a graduate member of the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Oxford, he proposed the Theory of Intention Awareness (IA). In 2002, he received a second doctoral degree in cognitive informatics and mathematics from the prestigious La Sorbonne in France. In 2007 he was awarded the habilitation a diriger des recherches (HDR) for his leading work on the Physics of Cognition (PoC) and its applications to complex medical, economical, and security equilibriums.
In 2014 he received his doctorate of philosophy from the University of Oxford for his work on neurodegenerative diseases, specifically his “Brain Code” Theorem. His work has made a significant impact on the design of command and control systems as well as information exchange systems used at tactical, operational and strategic levels. As the creator of IA, Dr. Howard was able to develop operational systems for military and law enforcement projects. These utilize an intent-centric approach to inform decision-making and ensure secure information sharing.
His work has brought him into various academic and government projects of significant magnitude, which focus on science and the technological transfer to industry. While Prof. Howard’s career formed in military scientific research, in 2002 he founded the Center for Advanced Defense Studies (CADS) a leading Washington, D.C, national security group. Currently, Dr. Howard serves as the Director of the Board. He also is a national security advisor to several U.S. Government organizations.
Prof. Howard’s several years of working on systems design and dynamic systems analysis in military applications, as well as his personal research experiences, led him to studying the human brain.
In 2008, Dr. Howard founded the Mind Machine Project at MIT; an interdisciplinary initiative to reconcile natural intelligence with machine intelligence, which led to the establishment of the Brain Sciences Foundation (BSF) in 2011. That same year, he published the Mood State Indicators (MSI) algorithm which models and explains the mental processes involved in human speech and writing to predict emotional states.
His cognitive natural-language approach to systems understanding and design has led to building more accurate engines for modeling behavioral and cognitive feedback. Due to this work, in 2012, Dr. Howard became the Director of the Synthetic Intelligence Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he focuses on the molecular basis for human intelligence. This could yield significant benefits and enable the progress in artificial intelligence and neuroscience as a whole.
As Prof. Howard has begun focusing on the development of functional brain and neuron interfacing abilities, he particularly concentrated on theoretical mathematical models to represent the exchange of information inside the human brain. This work, published in 2012, called the Fundamental Code Unit (FCU), has proven applicable in the diagnosis and study of brain disorders and has aided in developing and implementing necessary pharmacological and therapeutic tools for physicians. He has also developed individualized strategies to incorporate solutions for psychiatric and brain prosthetic.
Dr. Howard presently serves as Professor of Computational Neurology and Functional Neurosurgery at the University of Oxford and Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences at John Radcliffe Hospital. Prof. Howard is also the Founder and Director of the Oxford Computational Neuroscience Lab (OxCNL).