Ross Gayler, PhD

Credit scoring:
Applied statistical modeller working on operational prediction of customer behaviour, especially in consumer finance. Employed since 1989 by vendor and client organisations for project work and R&D of products and services. Particular expertise in profitability modelling, customer responses to lender actions, and optimisation of lender policies. I use a range of non-standard modelling techniques but always hold pragmatism as more important than technical virtuosity when applied to systems that make millions of automated decisions.

Cognitive science:
Independent researcher developing a practical, implementable, connectionist architecture for compositional memory. This is concerned with the ability to recognise novel situations and objects in terms of the novel pattern of structural relationships between their familiar component parts. This work effectively treats analogy as a primitive capability of memory. Current standard machine-learning techniques have limited capacity to deal with patterns of relationships and consequently have difficulty recognising novel configurations of familiar components or recognising familiar patterns of relationship when the components have been changed. If successful, this work will have fundamental implications for cognitive science.