Paul Smolensky
Paul Smolensky, a professor of Cognitive Science at the Johns Hopkins University. Smolensky along with Alan Prince developed Optimality Theory, a controversial but influential theory about the organization of phonology. He is a member of the Center for Language and Speech Processing.
Smolensky is the recipient of the 2005 David E. Rumelhart Prize (named after David Rumelhart) for his pursuit of the ICS Architecture, a model of cognition that aims to unify Connectionism and symbolism, where the symbolic representations and operations are manifested as abstractions on the underlying connectionist networks.