His multi-disciplinary background includes expertise in psychology, biology, physics, neuroscience and computer science.
Anderson, along with Andrew Duchon, Jeff Stibel, Steve P. Reiss, George A. Miller, Paul Allopenna, John Santini, Carl Dunham, and a number of other Brown University colleagues, created a search engine based on the work of Miller's WordNet and Anderson's neural networks.
[2] The science was applied broadly to numerous technology and business applications, most notably Internet search and advertising.
Anderson's neural networks were used to spread across a WordNet knowledgebase and disambiguate ambiguous search terms.
As an example, the neural networks would take user input, such as a search keyword (Java), disambiguate the term (Java, in the sense of Coffee) and then expand the search term to create a more complete weighted search function (i.e., Java, coffee, Joe, starbucks).