Barbara Di Eugenio named Warren S. McCulloch Collegiate Professor of Computer Science
Introduction
In a ceremony on Sep 20 2024, Professors Barbara Di Eugenio and Michael Papka are the first recipients of the Warren S. McCulloch Professorship in Computer Science. Their appointments run for seven years.
Warren McCulloch, a neurophysiologist and cybernetician, was a professor of psychiatry at UIC for about a decade in the 1940s. Together with Walter Pitts, a logician, McCulloch published a groundbreaking paper that proposed a simplified mathematical model of a biological neuron. This model, known as the McCulloch-Pitts neuron, is the basis for deep learning networks. This professorship is funded directly by the computer science department. (courtesy https://engineering.uic.edu/about/coe-news/rise/rise-fall-2024/endowed-professorships/)