Golden Goose awards for woodpeckers, penguins, and artificial intelligence

 The Golden Goose awards are given each year to "recognize the tremendous human and economic benefits of federally funded research by highlighting examples of seemingly obscure studies that have led to major breakthroughs and resulted in significant societal impact."

This year they recognize three streams of work, that have led to the recovery of an endangered woodpecker species, to the more effective counting of penguins, and to the invention of neural nets on which the current artificial intelligence industry is based.

Here are those stories.

It’s a Family Affair: The Resurgence of the Red-Cockaded Woodpecker  AWARDEE: Jeff Walters

From Poop to Protection: Satellite Discoveries Help Save Antarctic Penguins and Advance Wildlife Monitoring  AWARDEES: Christian Che-Castaldo, Heather Joan Lynch, Mathew Schwaller

How We Think: Brain-Inspired Models of Human Cognition Contribute to the Foundations of Today’s Artificial Intelligence  AWARDEES: Geoffrey Hinton, James L. McClelland, David E. Rumelhart

Here's the first paragraph of the description of this third award (last but not least:)

"Decades before artificial intelligence emerged as the platform for innovation that it is today, David Rumelhart, James McClelland, and Geoffrey Hinton were exploring a new model to explain human cognition. Dissatisfied with the prevailing symbolic theory of cognition, David Rumelhart began to articulate the need for a new approach to modeling cognition in the mid-1970s, teaming up with McClelland with support from the National Science Foundation to create a model of human perception that employed a new set of foundational ideas. At around the same time, Don Norman, an early leader in the field of cognitive science, obtained funding from the Sloan Foundation to bring together an interdisciplinary group of junior scientists, including Hinton, with backgrounds in computer science, physics, and neuroscience. Rumelhart, McClelland, and Hinton led the development of the parallel distributed processing framework, also known as PDP, in the early-1980s, focusing on how networks of simple processing units, inspired by the properties of neurons in the brain, could give rise to human cognitive abilities. While many had dismissed the use of neural networks as a basis for building models of cognition in the 1960s and 1970s, the PDP group revived interest in the approach. Skeptics critiqued the new models too, and had only limited success in enabling effective artificially intelligent systems until the 2010s, when massive increases in the amount of available data and computer power enabled Hinton and others to achieve breakthroughs leading to an explosion of new technological advancements and applications."

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Prior awards included market design in 2013 and 2014.