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George A. Miller
Born	February 3, 1920 (1920-02-03) (age 88) Charleston, West Virginia
Residence	U.S.
Nationality	American
Fields	Psychology, Cognitive Science
Institutions	Princeton University Harvard University Massachusetts Institute of Technology Rockefeller University Oxford University American Psychological Association
Known for	The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two overseeing development of WordNet
Notable awards	National Medal of Science (1991)

George Armitage Miller, born February 3, 1920 in Charleston, West Virginia), is a professor of psychology at Princeton University. He formerly served as Professor of Psychology at Rockefeller University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Harvard University, where he was Chairman of the Department of Psychology. He was a Fulbright Research Fellow at Oxford University and served as the President of the American Psychological Association. His most famous work was The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information, which was published in 1956 in The Psychological Review.

In 1960, Miller founded the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard with Jerome Bruner, a cognitive developmentalist. In the same year he published 'Plans and the Structure of Behaviour' (with Eugene Galanter and Karl Pribram), which outlined their conception of Cognitive Psychology.

In the linguistics community, Miller is well-known for overseeing the development of WordNet, a semantic network for the English language. Development began in 1985 and the project has received about $3 million of funding, mainly from government agencies interested in machine translation.

In 1991, Miller received National Medal of Science.

In 1956, Miller suggested that seven (plus or minus two) was the magic number that characterized people's memory performance on random lists of letters, words, numbers, or almost any kind of meaningful familiar item.

He is also known for coining Miller's Law: In order to understand what another person is saying, you must assume it is true and try to imagine what it could be true of.

Magic number seven

Working memory is generally considered to have limited capacity. The earliest quantification of the capacity limit associated with short-term memory was the "magical number seven" introduced by Miller (1956)^[1]. He noticed that the memory span of young adults was around seven elements, called chunks, regardless whether the elements were digits, letters, words, or other units. Later research revealed that span does depend on the category of chunks used (e.g., span is around seven for digits, around six for letters, and around 5 for words), and even on features of the chunks within a category. For instance, span is lower for long than for short words. In general, memory span for verbal contents (digits, letters, words, etc.) strongly depends on the time it takes to speak the contents aloud, and on the lexical status of the contents (i.e., whether the contents are words known to the person or not)^[2]. Several other factors also affect a person's measured span, and therefore it is difficult to pin down the capacity of short-term or working memory to a number of chunks. Nonetheless, Cowan (2001)^[3] has proposed that working memory has a capacity of about four chunks in young adults (and less in children and old adults).

WordNet and Simpli

George Miller was the founder of WordNet, a linguistic knowledgebase that maps the way the mind stores and uses language. He spent the later part of his career building and expanding this database. He also worked on a number of commercial applications based on WordNet, most notably, Simpli. Simpli was an early Internet search and marketing engine created by George Miller and a number of Professors and graduate students at Brown University, including Jeff Stibel, James A. Anderson and Steve Reiss. Simpli utilized WordNet to "read" search queries and disambiguate them. It was also used to read webpages and derive representative keywords so that advertising could be presented. This is the underlying principle behind Google's advertising technology--AdSense--which was derived directly from WordNet and Simpli.^[4]

References

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