Fresco, Nir | Australia

Nir is a PhD candidate in the School of History & Philosophy at the University of New South Wales. He has a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Tel Aviv-Yaffo Academic College and a Master's degree from Tel Aviv University in Philosophy. He has been working in the Information Technology industry in the last 12 and has a wealth of experience in computer programming as well as professional project management. His doctoral research, "Competing Accounts of Concrete Digital Computation", philosophically explores extant accounts of digital computation as it is actualised in physical systems, and examines the implications of these various accounts for Cognitive Science. At IAS-STS, Nir will continue his work on a particular project, "The Information Processing Account of Computation", exploring the widely-held view that digital computation just is the processing of information. In addition, he has tutoring experience in philosophy at undergraduate level.

Project at IAS-STS: Information Processing Account of Concrete Digital Computation

This research examines various conceptions of 'Information' in an attempt to establish the foundations for an explicit account of digital computation in terms of Information Processing. This is part of a larger scale project where various accounts of computation are examined, some of which are judged as being inadequate for the phenomenon of computation in physical systems. An Information Processing account of computation seems like a natural candidate for explaining this phenomenon. After all, artificial digital computers traffic in data. But when ‘information’ comes under scrutiny, the resulting account becomes a less obvious candidate. ‘Information’ may be interpreted semantically or non-semantically, and its interpretation has direct implications for the resulting Information Processing account. This project deals with the implications of various interpretations of 'Information' for explaining concrete digital computation. Some of the interpretations that will be explored are the non-semantic conceptions of 'Information' based on Claude Shannon's theory of information and Algorithmic Information Theory. Other semantic conceptions that will be explored are Instructional Information and Factual Information. The key requirements for a physical system to compute based on an Information Processing account are also fleshed out.
 

Selected publications


Refereed Journal Publications:

“Explaining Computation Without Semantics: Keeping It Simple”. Minds and Machines, Vol. 20, Issue 2, 2010, pp.165–181.

“A Computational Account of Connectionist Networks”. Recent Patents on Computer Science, Vol. 3, Issue 1, 2010, pp. 20-27 (invited paper).

“An Analysis of the Criteria for Evaluating Adequate Theories of Computation”. Minds and Machines, Vol. 18, Issue 3, 2008, pp. 379-401.

Recent Conference Presentations:

“Digital Computation as Information Processing”. Proceedings of AISB 2011, pp. 58-64. Presented at York University in April 2011.