I am currently a research assistant in the Division of Psychology at the Univeristy of Abertay Dundee. From July 2006 until July 2008 I was a JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow in the Complex Systems and Artificial Life Lab at the University of Tokyo. Between April and June 2006 I was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Computational Cognitive Science Lab of the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. I'm working on language evolution, and acquisition. During 2005 and 2006 I was an Economic and Social Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh, where I worked in the Language, Evolution and Computation Research Unit on a project called "Understanding Language through Bayesian and Evolutionary Models".

In 2004-2005 I was a research associate in the GATE team in the natural language processing group at Sheffield University. Until August 2003 I was a Ph.D. student in the Smart Internet Technology Research Group in the School of Information Technologies, at the University of Sydney. Until July 1999 I was in the Linguistics Department, and before that in the Linguistics and Psychology Departments at Edinburgh University, where I got my MA(honours) degree (in psychology and linguistics), though I did my dissertation in the Centre for Cognitive Science. I also tried my hand at being a marine scientist for about six months in the School of Geosciences, also at Sydney University where I wrote the Ellipsis GUI. Here is a brief (and increasingly out of date) CV.

Representative Publications

Simon Kirby, Mike Dowman and Thomas L. Griffiths (2007). Innateness and Culture in the Evolution of Language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 104(12): 5241-5245

Mike Dowman (2007). Explaining Color Term Typology with an Evolutionary Model. Cognitive Science, 31(1): 99-132

Mike Dowman (2008). The Nature of Words in Human Protolanguages: It's not a Holophrastic-Atomic Meanings Dichotomy. Artifical Life,14(4): 445-465

Mike Dowman, Virginia Savova, Thomas L. Griffiths, Konrad P. Kording, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Matthew Purver (2008) A Probabilistic Model of Meetings that Combines Words and Discourse Features. IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, 16(7): 1238-1248