David Martin Ward Powers is originally from Sydney and is currently based in Adelaide, but has lived and worked in many countries. He is a scientist, researcher and inventor in Artificial Intelligence, Behavioural and Cognitive Science, Neuroscience and Robotics. His award-winning research has been foundational for half a dozen or so startups, and he is the author or co-author of around 300 scientific publications - including three books published by Springer Nature.
Powers is Professor of Computer Science and Cognitive Science at Flinders University in South Australia, and is also founding Editor-in-Chief of the Springer Cognitive Science and Technology Series. He pioneered statistical and neural learning of embedding language models in the early 1980s, founded the SIGNLL peak organization and CoNLL conference series on Natural Language Learning in the early 1990s, and developed the Informedness and Markedness statistics in the early 2000s.
He has written a number of short stories in a Science Fiction, Fantasy or Allegory vein, which have been used in teacher training, research or other academic contexts, including publication in small circulation newsletters. More recently he has had stories published Antipodean, as well as the Out of their Minds and Fantastic Schools Staff anthologies.
Powers' research in Artificial Intelligence, Brain Computer Interface, Cognitive Neuroscience, Digital Health, etc. provide the background for his novels published under the name Marti Ward. All three of his Paradisi Lost Mission books have won awards, as has his Time for PsyQ — first in the new YA Quantum Talents series. He is also working to bring his father's SF stories to [e]Book form, including completing some unfinished stories by the late B. Ward Powers.
These novels are firmly in the Hard Science Fiction genre and are targeted to Young Adults from 9 to 99, aiming to appeal to precocious school students as well as inquisitive adults interested in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).
David/Marti is a member of the Blackwood Writers Group and helped produced their anthology "Out of their Minds" which includes two of his full length short stories (including the one that grew to be Time for PsyQ) and two of his flash fiction fables (one of which later reappeared in both print and audio form in Antipodean SF).
