Gail Carpenter is a cognitive scientist

Cognitive science

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...

, neuroscientist

Neuroscientist

A neuroscientist is an individual who studies the scientific field of neuroscience or any of its related sub-fields...

 and mathematician

Mathematician

A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study is the field of mathematics. Mathematicians are concerned with quantity, structure, space, and change....

. She is a Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems and a Professor of Mathematics at Boston University

Boston University

Boston University is a private research university located in Boston, Massachusetts. With more than 4,000 faculty members and more than 31,000 students, Boston University is one of the largest private universities in the United States and one of Boston's largest employers...

, and the director of the Boston University Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems (CNS) Technology Lab.

Adaptive resonance theory

Together with Stephen Grossberg

Stephen Grossberg

Stephen Grossberg is a cognitive scientist, neuroscientist, biomedical engineer, mathematician, and neuromorphic technologist. He is the Wang Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems and a Professor of Mathematics, Psychology, and Biomedical Engineering at Boston University.Grossberg's work...

 and their students and colleagues, Gail has, since the 1980s, developed the adaptive resonance theory

Adaptive resonance theory

Adaptive Resonance Theory is a theory developed by Stephen Grossberg and Gail Carpenter on aspects of how the brain processes information. It describes a number of neural network models which use supervised and unsupervised learning methods, and address problems such as pattern recognition and...

 (ART) family of neural networks

Neural Networks

Neural Networks is the official journal of the three oldest societies dedicated to research in neural networks: International Neural Network Society, European Neural Network Society and Japanese Neural Network Society, published by Elsevier...

 for fast stable online learning, pattern recognition

Pattern recognition

In machine learning, pattern recognition is the assignment of some sort of output value to a given input value , according to some specific algorithm. An example of pattern recognition is classification, which attempts to assign each input value to one of a given set of classes...

, and prediction, including both unsupervised (ART 1, ART 2, ART 2-A, ART 3, fuzzy ART, distributed ART) and supervised (ARTMAP, fuzzy ARTMAP, ART-EMAP, ARTMAP-IC, ARTMAP-FTR, distributed ARTMAP, default ARTMAP) systems. These ART models have been used for a wide range of applications, including remote sensing

Remote sensing

Remote sensing is the acquisition of information about an object or phenomenon, without making physical contact with the object. In modern usage, the term generally refers to the use of aerial sensor technologies to detect and classify objects on Earth by means of propagated signals Remote sensing...

, medical diagnosis

Medical diagnosis

Medical diagnosis refers both to the process of attempting to determine or identify a possible disease or disorder , and to the opinion reached by this process...

, automatic target recognition, mobile robots, and database management.

Awards

She is the first woman to receive the IEEE Neural Networks Pioneer Award. She has been elected to successive three-year terms on the Board of Governors of the International Neural Network Society (INNS) since its founding, in 1987, and received the INNS Gabor Award. She has also served as an elected member of the Council of the American Mathematical Society

American Mathematical Society

The American Mathematical Society is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, which it does with various publications and conferences as well as annual monetary awards and prizes to mathematicians.The society is one of the...

, and is a charter member of the Association for Women in Mathematics.