Getting It Right: R&D Methods for Science and Engineering

Over the past decade, the author has met with directors of R&D departments in large industrial firms, who are frustrated by the lack of coherent and consistent methodologies in R&D projects. As a direct result the author was asked to design and present a seminar to provide R&D engineers and scientists a standard methodology for conducting coherent, rigorous, comprehensible, and consistent R&D projects. The author also realized that this training should be included in engineering and science curricula in universities and colleges. To this end, he designed and presented a pilot course for his department that was received enthusiastically by students who participated. This course has now become a required course for all doctoral students in the author's department.

This book has been designed to provide professional engineers, scientists, and students with a consistent and practical framework for the rigorous conduct and communication of complex research and development projects. Although courses and training in research methods are common and generally required of social science professionals, a vast majority of physical scientists and engineers have had no formal classroom training or on-the-job mentoring on proper procedures for research methods. Getting It Right emphasizes the comprehensive analysis of project problems, requirements, and objectives; the use of standard and consistent terminology and procedures; the design of rigorous and reproducible experiments; the appropriate reduction and interpretation of project results; and the effective communication of project design, methods, results, and conclusions.

Bock received an undergraduate degree in Physics from Ripon College in 1962. After finishing his graduate studies, he was invited to join the NASA Apollo Program, eventually becoming the director for orbital simulation software development at NASA headquarters in Washington DC.

Following the first successful manned Lunar landing in 1969, Bock was invited to join the faculty of the Department of Computer Science at The George Washington University in Washington DC, where he designed and established a new graduate curriculum in Artificial Intelligence. Over the next 20 years he added courses in neurophysiology, cognitive science, and statistics to the computer science core in the graduate AI curriculum to expand the biological knowledge and sharpen the empirical perspective of the students.

During a two-year stay as a visiting professor at the University of Ulm in Germany, Bock and his graduate students developed the well-known Project ALISA (Adaptive Learning for Image and Signal Analysis) with generous funding from the large German corporation Robert Bosch GmbH. For the next 20 years, research funding from both industry and government enabled the support of many doctoral students who are now successfully employed in academia or industry around the world. Bock has published more than 100 scholarly papers and book chapters, as well as presented many invited lectures in government, academia, industry, NGOs, and special public events.

Bock retired from George Washington University in 2011, but still directs several doctoral students as well as his own research in AI, focusing primarily on natural language processing, high-dimensional clustering, and the development of artificial neural networks that acquire and apply their knowledge using adaptive statistical learning. In 2012 he was invited to present a TED Talk, which can be viewed at www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpNfy7AUPl4. His long-term research objective has remained unchanged for the last 45 years: the construction of an artificially intelligent being (already named Mada) whose intellectual and emotional capabilities are on a par with human beings.

In addition to his technical background, Bock speaks German and is broadly educated in the humanities and social sciences, with special interests in theatre, music, the history of technology and culture, and neonatal developmental psychology. He lives with his wife in downtown Washington DC in the midst of a jumble of computers and musical instruments.