Biography

William A. (Bill) Adams, Ph.D.

I’m a cognitive psychologist who left the academic classroom for the computer industry to find out if the mind is like a computer. I began as a lowly software engineer and eventually became head of technology for a national nonprofit serving homeless children. I started writing fiction to dramatize what I had discovered about human and AI minds.

My degree is from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, specializing in human memory and perception. I did a post-doc in visual perception with James Gibson at Cornell. It  took me years to understand his ideas. I then taught psychology at a liberal arts college, got the travel bug and signed up with the University of Maryland’s overseas division. I traveled the world with them for several years, teaching military personnel and dependents in Europe, Asia, and the Middle-east.

Returning to the U.S., I worked as a software engineer in “human factors,” helping to design cockpit instrumentation in commercial airliners. I moved on to other software engineering firms, writing code, studying artificial intelligence. I eventually made the mistake of going into management, where I became head of technology for a large corporation. I was a terrible manager. I assumed everyone would do the right thing. Why wouldn’t they?

Fleeing the corporate world, I returned to  classroom teaching classes with a large online component. I migrated to all-online teaching, which is a different, but effective form of education (when properly done). It also has the advantage of geographical freedom so now I live in Tucson.

My Psi-fi writing can be found at www.PsiFiBooks.com, which is my publishing empire.  Please give it a look.

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