Bock received his undergraduate degree in physics and mathematics from Ripon College in 1962. After completing his graduate studies at Purdue University in 1965, he joined the research faculty at IIT Research Institute (IITRI) in Chicago, where he developed high-speed computer simulations of the proposed Earth and Lunar orbital remote-sensing missions of the NASA Apollo Program.

Following the first successful Lunar landing mission, Bock returned to academia, and since 1970 has been a full-time professor in the Department of Computer Science at The George Washington University in Washington DC. As well as teaching graduate courses in machine intelligence and cognition, he conducts research in adaptive learning systems and directs Project ALISA (Adaptive Learning Image and Signal Analysis).

Bock is credited with the development of Collective Learning Systems Theory and has published many papers in this area. His books include The Emergence of Artificial Cognition: An Introduction to Collective Learning, published in 1993 by World Scientific Publishing Company; and Getting it Right: Research Methods for Science and Engineering, published by Academic Press in 2001.

Over the years, Professor Bock's research has been funded by several organizations, including the Research Institute for Applied Knowledge Processing (FAW) in Ulm, Germany where Project ALISA was born in the early 1990s; several industrial firms, including Robert Bosch in Stuttgart, Germany (Vehicle Driver Performance Analysis), Lockheed-Martin (Hubble Space Telescope Project); and government agencies, including the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NASA, the United States Navy, and currently the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) in cooperation with Bechtel/Nevada.

Under the current DTRA funding, Project ALISA is addressing two significant research objectives: 1) to develop accurate and fast classifiers of mixtures of radioisotopes for use in finding and inventorying mixtures of radioactive compounds, both legitimate and illegitimate (e.g., hospital repositories and radiological weapons); and 2) to detect "objects-of-interest" (e.g., guns and knives) in x-ray images of briefcases at security checkpoints.

The current research focus of Professor Bock and his team of doctoral students is on the fusion of the ALISA modules and several sophisticated unsupervised clustering algorithms into an adaptive hierarchical engine for high-level symbolic pattern recognition and classification of natural language and speech recognition.

Professor Bock's long-term research objective is the design and implementation of an artificially intelligent being whose cognitive capabilities are on a par with those of human beings.


Professor, Machine Intelligence and Cognition
Department of Computer Science
The George Washington University