Afzal Upal

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Muhammad Afzal Upal is a writer and a cognitive scientist with contributions to cognitive science of religion, [1] machine learning for planning, [2] [3] and agent-based social simulation. [4]

Contents

Early life and education

He was born in Pakistan with 2 sisters and 3 brothers. His family emigrated to Canada because Ahmadiyya, the form of Islam they practiced, was discriminated against in Pakistan. [5] For his PhD research, he worked under the supervision of Professor Renee Elio at the University of Alberta. In December 1999, he successfully defended his thesis on "Learning to Improve the Quality of Plans Produced by Partial-order Planners". [6]

Leadership

He was chair of the First International Workshop on Cognition and Culture, the 14th Annual Conference of the North American Association for Computational, Social, and Organizational Sciences, and the AAAI-06 Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Agent-based Social Simulation. [7]

Professional career

In July 1999, Upal was hired as a tenure-track assistant professor of computer science at Dalhousie University's new Faculty of Computer Science. In 2001, he moved to Information Extraction & Transport (IET) Inc. to work as a senior scientist on various DARPA sponsored projects to develop Bayesian network based decision-aid systems. In July 2003, he joined the University of Toledo's Electrical Engineering & Computer Science Department as a tenure track assistant professor to teach computer science. From 2008 to 2017, he worked as a defense scientist at Defence R & D Canada's Toronto Research Centre. [8] From 2017 to 2020, he served as the head of the Computing and Information Science at Mercyhurst University. [9] Since 2020, he has been working as the Chair of the Computer Science & Software Engineering Department at University of Wisconsin-Platteville. [10] [11]

Scientific contributions

He has contributed to research areas of Cognition & Culture and Cognitive science of religion through the development of the Context-based model of minimal counterintuiveness. [12] [13] In a 2005 article in the Journal of Cognition and Culture , he proposed a cognitive science of new religious movements. [14] Upal has also pioneered a knowledge-rich agent-based social simulation technique for simulating the development of complex cultural beliefs. [15] In 2017, his book Moderate Fundamentalists: Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama'at in the lens of cognitive science of religion, was published by DeGruyter Press. The book uses Context-based model of minimal counterintuiveness to explain counterintuitive claims of new religious movement founders such as Mirza Ghulam Ahmad-the founder of Ahmadiyya Islam. [16] He co-edited the Brill Handbook of Islamic Sects & Movements with Professor Carole M. Cusack. [17]

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Cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer argued that minimally counterintuitive concepts (MCI) i.e., concepts that violate a few ontological expectations of a category such as the category of an agent, are more memorable than intuitive and maximally counterintuitive (MXCI) concepts. A number of experimental psychology studies have found support for Boyer's hypothesis. Upal labelled this as the minimal counterintuitiveness effect or the MCI-effect.

The context-based model of the counterintuitiveness effect is a cognitive model of The Minimal Counterintuitiveness Effect i.e., the finding by many cognitive scientists of religion that minimally counterintuitive concepts are more memorable for people than intuitive and maximally counterintuitive concepts

Postdictable concepts are those concepts that can be justified after having been seen. Upal labeled a counterintuitive concept as postdictable if the postdiction process is successful making sense of the concept i.e., the reader is successfully able to construct a justification given the reader's background knowledge, level of motivation and interest, and the cognitive resources available to the reader. According to the context-based model of minimal counterintuiveness, postdictable counterintuitive concepts are minimally counterintuitive and are remembered well. Those counterintuitive concepts that are not postdictable in a given context are considered to be maximally counterintuitive and are not remembered well by people. Thus the concept of a flying elephant is postdictable when set up in the context of Operation Dumbo Drop because it can be justified in that context. The concept of a "square triangle that only exists on Wednesdays and eats cats" however does not make any sense and is therefore not postdictable.

Cognitive science of new religious movements is the study of new religious movements from the perspective of cognitive science. The field employs methods and theories from a variety of disciplines, including cognitive science of religion, sociology of religion, scientific study of religion, anthropology, and artificial life. Scholars in the field seek to explain the origin and evolution of new religious movements in terms of ordinary universal cognitive processes.

References

  1. ↑ Y. Russell & F. Gobet (2013) What is Counterintuitive? Religious Cognition and Natural Expectation, Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 4(4), 715-749.
  2. ↑ Fern, Alan. "Learning for Planning". Learning for Planning: Resources, Papers, and Researchers. University of Oregon. Retrieved 2014-02-07.
  3. ↑ M. A. Upal. (2005) Learning to improve plan quality, Computational Intelligence Journal, 21(4), 440-461.
  4. ↑ M. A. Upal (2014) Three practical lessons from the science of influence operations and message design, Canadian Military Journal, 14(2), 53-58
  5. ↑ "Dr. Afzal Upal". Centre for Inquiry - Canada. Retrieved 9 June 2018.
  6. ↑ Upal, M. Afzal. "Learning to improve quality of the plans produced by partial-order planners" (PDF). Collections Canada. Government of Canada. Retrieved 2014-02-07.
  7. ↑ M. A. Upal & R. Sun (editors) Cognitive Modeling and Agent-based Social Simulation: Papers from the AAAI-06 Workshop ( ISBN   978-1-57735-284-6), Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press, 2006.
  8. ↑ M. A. Upal (2014) Three practical lessons from the science of influence operations and message design, Canadian Military Journal, 14(2), 53-58
  9. ↑ Boyle, Marina. "New at Hurst: Afzal Upal, Ph.D." The Merciad. Retrieved 2023-01-31.
  10. ↑ "Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering".
  11. ↑ "Pioneer Spotlight: Dr. Afzal Upal". 13 November 2020.
  12. ↑ M. A. Upal, L. Gonce, R. Tweney, and J. Slone (2007) Contextualizing counterintuitiveness: How context affects comprehension and memorability of counterintuitive concepts, Cognitive Science, 31(3), 415-439.
  13. ↑ M. A. Upal (2011) From Individual to Social Counterintuitiveness: How layers of innovation weave together to form tapestries of human cultures, Mind and Society, 10(1), 79-96.
  14. ↑ M. A. Upal. (2005) Towards A Cognitive Science of New Religious Movements, Journal of Cognition and Culture, 5(2), 214-239
  15. ↑ M. A. Upal (2005) Simulating the Emergence of New Religious Movements, Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 8(1)
  16. ↑ Upal, Muhammad Afzal (2017). Moderate Fundamentalists. DeGruyter Academic Press, Berlin. ISBN   978-3110556483.
  17. ↑ M. A. Upal and C. M. Cusack (2021) Brill Handbook of Islamic Sects and Movements, Leiden: Brill
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