John Ball (cognitive scientist)
John Samuel Ball (born 1963) is an American cognitive scientist, an expert in machine intelligence, computer architecture and the inventor of Patom Theory.
Born in Iowa USA whilst his Australian father Samuel Ball was working on his PhD in Educational Psychology, Ball returned with the family to Australia in 1978 to finish his secondary schooling on the north shore of Sydney. Ball received a Bachelor of Science in 1984 from the University of Sydney, a Masters of Cognitive Science from University of NSW in 1989 and a Master of Business Administration from MGSM (Macquarie Graduate School of Management) in 1997.
From a young age, Ball was fascinated by computers having been exposed to early mainframes at ETS (Educational Testing Service) in Princeton in the 1970s.
He was challenged by a lecturer as an undergraduate to pursue machine intelligence when she announced that computers would never be able to perform human like functions such as language or visual recognition.
His career begun at IBM Australia as a mainframe engineer, leading to country support specialist responsible for supporting and training hardware engineers across Australian and New Zealand on mainframe and I/O devices. His expertise was in the IBM 370 I/O architecture, learning from global designer of channel architecture, Kenneth Trowell. Following IBM in 1996 he worked in other large Australian corporates managing and defining the commercials of complex IT contracts between stakeholders.
Always interested in how machines could better emulate human brain functions, he postulated Patom theory – the word representing a combination of pattern matching and atom. This reflected his belief that the brain simply stores, matches and uses hierarchical, bidirectional linkset patterns (sequences and sets) as sufficient to explain human capabilities. This he claimed was the approach of the human brain to language and vision and was first publicly aired in 2000, on Robyn Williams’ Okham’s Razor.
Over the years, exchanges with Artificial Intelligence experts such as Marvin Minsky lead him to work on a prototype to demonstrate and prove his theory.
Ball left corporate life to focus full-time on proving a natural language understanding ( NLU) system with samples across diverse languages including Mandarin, Korean, German, Japanese, Spanish, English, French, Italian and Portuguese. Since 2007, Ball has filed 2 patents.
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