The three co-founders of Socos have combined their expertise in Cognition, Education and Machine Learning.
Socos was founded in San Francisco in 2011 by Vivienne Ming, Norma Ming and Engin Bumbacher. Our expertise and technology are based on education, cognitive science and machine learning research going back over a decade.
Vivienne Ming
Executive Director
Dr. Vivienne Ming, Chief Scientist, is responsible for the company's core cognitive modeling and predictive analytics technology. Previously, she worked as a research fellow at Stanford's Mind, Brain & Computation center and at UC Berkeley's Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, where she remains a visiting scholar. Vivienne developed novel and influential models of human perception and attention and has been published in prestigious scientific journals including Nature and Neural Computation. Vivienne earned her doctorate in Psychology and Computational Neuroscience from Carnegie Mellon University and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition researching information theoretic models of sensory and attentional processing. She earned a B.S. in Cognitive Neuroscience with honors at UCSD working on developing an algorithm for reading human facial expressions from video, with additional application as attention monitors for automated tutoring systems.
Engin Bumbacher
Director of Research
Engin is devoted to the development of the company’s core cognitive modeling and predictive analytics technology. He did his master’s thesis project at the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at UC Berkeley under the supervision of Dr. Vivienne Ming, applying and further developing elaborate models of information processing to human speech and music. Engin earned his master’s degree with honors in Neural Systems and Computation from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and the Institute of Neuroinformatics, both researching in the field of theoretical neuroscience and exploring models of collective intelligence through implementation of interactive flocking algorithms to control computer sound synthesis and 3D sound positioning. Prior to that, he finished his B.S. with honors in Physics at the same university.
Norma Ming
Director of Learning Design
Dr. Norma Ming, Board Member and advisor, is a Senior Research Scientist and Director of the Institute of Teaching and Learning at the Nexus Research and Policy Center. Nexus conducts research on learning and instruction at both proprietary and traditional institutions of higher education. She has been an educator and leader in education research for over 15 years. She developed assessments, curricular materials, and instructional programs for iMind Education Systems, American Computer Experience, and ETS, as well as multiple technology- mediated educational reform initiatives supported by the National Science Foundation and the W. M. Keck Foundation. Norma was also a lecturer in Education in Math, Science, and Technology at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Education, where she is now a visiting scholar. Norma earned an A.B. with honors in chemistry at Harvard University and a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology in the Program for Interdisciplinary Educational Research at Carnegie Mellon University.