UCSD - University of California - San Diego

06/01/2026 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 06/01/2026 18:10

A key chapter in AI began here

Published Date

June 01, 2026

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Eight years ago this month, my former colleague, friend and predecessor as Dean of Social Sciences, Jeff Elman passed away. He left behind a tremendous legacy not only as dean but also as a founding member of the first Cognitive Science Department in the world. Jeff was a prolific scholar of human language and cognition, but he was also a leader - someone who combined forces to build the academic department of Cognitive Science from what had been an emerging set of ideas about language, mind and computation.

In 1986, when Cognitive Science was formed, personal computers had just begun to spread and machines that could mirror human language and cognition were still aspirational. Computers were clunky and limited in what they could do. I remember being fantastically impressed that a single floppy disk could hold 25 whole pages of my dissertation text. The distance between where we were then and where we are today seems a galaxy away.

Carol Padden, Dean of the UC San Diego School of Social Sciences

I want to recognize Jeff as a person, a colleague, but also for the audacity to create a new department based on a future we could not possibly know. In 1986, we aspired to understand more deeply how language works and how it is possible for babies and young children to learn language so quickly. Today, we have machines that use large language models (LLMs) and can learn to use language in human-like ways.

Our Cognitive Science Department has faculty and students who have fulfilled Jeff's dream of a new course of study forged from disciplines across campus: Psychology, Linguistics, Philosophy, Computer Science, Anthropology and Sociology. It would be deeply human in its orientation, and it would strive to understand how humans use and build machines and tools to learn, think and solve problems including - notably, social problems. Not just machines, but people in societies using machines.

I was reminded of Jeff's prescience when I recently attended a symposium talk given by a leading scientist on language processing. A few slides into his talk, he projected the first page of one of Jeff's papers, "Finding Structure in Time" (Cognition, 1990). It is Jeff's most cited paper, with nearly 20,000 citations, and it demonstrated how to build in rudimentary form a machine that could form categories of words according to whether they were nouns or verbs in ways reminiscent of how humans use them. In Jeff's characteristic writing style, the paper was very clear and solidly technical. It became a starting point for what we know today as LLMs.

Geoffrey Hinton was a postdoctoral student at UC San Diego during the early years of building the Cognitive Science Department. In 2024, he received a Nobel Prize for his contributions to the foundational principles of artificial intelligence. Hinton has publicly acknowledged how critical his time at UC San Diego was and that working with Jeff shaped his career in AI.

As I take this moment to remember Jeff and his contributions, I am reminded that this is who we are in the social sciences at UC San Diego: we teach for today's realities, but we must face what lies ahead. AI brings profound challenges for humanity and society. It is our responsibility to position our departments and programs to meet these challenges.

Carol Padden
Dean of Social Sciences and the Sanford I. Berman Chair in Language and Human Communication

Learn more about research and education at UC San Diego in: Artificial Intelligence

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