Dr. Leonid Perlovsky is Principal Research Physicist and Technical Advisor at the AF Research Lab and Visiting Scholar at Harvard University. He leads research projects on mathematical models of the mind, cognitive algorithms, language, and cultural evolution. As Chief Scientist at Nichols Research, a $500mm high-tech organization, he led the corporate research in intelligent systems. He served as professor at Novosibirsk Engineering Institute and New York University; as a principal in commercial startups developing tools for biotechnology and financial predictions. His company predicted the market crash following 9/11 a week before the event, detecting ripples from Al Qaeda trades and later helped SEC looking for perpetrators. He is invited as a keynote speaker worldwide, including most prestigious venues such as the Nobel Forum; published more than 465 publications, 4 books in Oxford and Springer, received 2 patents. Dr. Perlovsky participates in organizing conferences on Computational Intelligence, serves as Chair for the IEEE Boston Computational Intelligence Chapter; Chair for the IEEE Task Force on The Mind and Brain, on the International Neural Network Society (INNS) Board of Governors as Chair of The Award Committee. He serves on the Editorial Board of ten professional journals, has founded and serves as Editor-in-Chief for"Physics of Life Reviews," (IF=7.2, ranked #4 in the world among 82 biophysics journals by Thomson Reuters). He received National and International awards including the Gabor Award; and the John McLucas Award, the highest US Air Force Award for basic research.

Is it possible to understand the mind from few basic principles? The talk describes steps towards such a theory of the mind. Known first principles include mechanisms of concepts, emotions, the knowledge instinct, the mind hierarchy, and dynamic logic (DL). DL is a basis for a mathematical theory of learning, combining the first principles into a hierarchical mental system. Orders of magnitude improvements are achieved in pattern recognition, data mining, information integration, financial predictions. The talk describes how does language interact with cognition? What are the mechanisms of higher cognitive abilities? What is the beautiful? Why does music, "just sounds," affect us emotionally? Why did these abilities emerge in evolution? Darwin called music "the greatest mystery." The DL model gives answers and testable predictions. Some explanations are experimentally confirmed, others remain to be tested in future.