June 2, 1998, Imperial College, London

The 11th Colin Cherry Memorial Lecture on Communication
Introduction by Professor Bruce Sayers, Emeritus Professor, Imperial College

          

Welcome to the Colin Cherry Memorial Lecture on Communication. This lecture this evening is the 11th in the series. It’s sponsored by SBC Warburg Dillon Read, to whom we are grateful for this support.

Now I would like to add my own appreciation and yours to Robert Spence, the organizer of this lecture, [and] like me a former research student and later a member of staff of Colin Cherry. Professor Spence is in Chaucer’s words "the progenitor and only begetter" of this entire series.

Now, before introducing this evening’s speaker, let me tell you a little about Colin Cherry and why the memorial lectures. Both Robert Spence and I worked quite closely and individually for a number of years with Colin Cherry in rather different fields. When I remark that this was a great privilege, this is not an empty comment.

Colin was an extraordinary, original thinker. He enlarged intellectual horizons. He managed to cast new light on almost anything that he studied. And because he was a scintillating lecturer, he managed to ensure that one always, and I mean always, came away from his lectures with a great sense not only of fresh understanding, but a special delight in the way that it had emerged.

Colin’s wartime and early postwar period was in the research laboratories of GEC as an electrical engineer. His first book emerged from that period. It was a highly innovative, original monograph on technological and mathematical issues concerned with electrical circuit analysis.

Now, he and Dennis Gabor both came to Imperial College in 1950, and the two of them laid much of the foundation of modern Information Theory. In 1958, Colin was appointed Professor of Telecommunication here at the college and held his chair until his death in 1979.

But in the early 1950s he started research on a broad range of issues in human communication. Having investigated the technicalities of communication, it was natural for him, though a revolution in thought for many others, to start thinking about the human beings at the ends of the communication chain. He started to consider how human beings communicate, not of course why they communicate, though he had been philosopher enough to do that as well because he had a natural interest in both historic and current philosophical and cultural thought.

Colin recognized that perception, a key element in communication, was not a passive process. It’s a variety of behaviors by which one orientates oneself mentally in relation to the outside world as part of the process of making sense of it. This led him to investigate, amongst many other lines of experimental inquiry, human behavioral activity in, for example, the communication process--in hearing, in speech perception and speech production and in visual communication. In brief, Cherry explored and wrote about the totality of the concept of communication, its technology, its human dimension, its social significance and its power to influence economic development.

Formal recognition came rather later to Colin Cherry than to Dennis Gabor. However, his books, particularly that on human communication, are classics, very well known and highly influential. In 1978, he was awarded the prestigious Marconi International Fellowship. Sadly, he died in 1979 before reaching retirement, but he left a great legacy of original thought and most certainly inspiration to all those who had the privilege of knowing this delightful man.

Now to the present task of introducing our speaker this evening, Dr. Seymour Papert. He is well known for a number of achievements, not least of which was as cofounder of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT and later the Media Lab. Like Colin Cherry, Seymour Papert seems to have been something of a Renaissance man with many aspects to his background. He’s a mathematician. His studies took him to Cambridge and later to Paris. He has worked with the famous Jean Piaget in Geneva. That was the Piaget who had achieved a remarkable insight into the perceptual and cognitive development of the child. Papert’s collaboration with Piaget was presumably one of the catalysts that led him to bring mathematics to the task of understanding how children learn and think. Now, this approach has been spectacularly successful. He has also been recognized, as was Colin Cherry, with the award of the Marconi International Fellowship.

The writer Philip Oakes once penned a few lines about his own early years. He said, "I could see that childhood was an invention of grown-ups, a fiction we were required to take on trust, in case we demanded something better." Well, now the something better has arrived and I am delighted to invite Dr. Seymour Papert to tell us about it in his lecture entitled "Child Power: Keys to the New Learning of the Digital Century."