John Laird

Tishman Professor of Engineering, University of Michigan

John Laird has served on the faculty of the Computer Science and Engineering Division of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of the University of Michigan since 1996. He teaches as a professor of engineering. He is also the founder of Soar Technology, an Ann Arbor company specializing in creating autonomous AI entities.

Soar is a symbolic cognitive architecture, created by John Laird, Allen Newell, and Paul Rosenbloom at Carnegie Mellon University. It has been widely used by AI researchers to model aspects of human behavior. The main goal of the Soar project has been to handle the full range of capabilities of an intelligent agent, from highly routine to extremely difficult open-ended problems. He is also the co-author of the paper "Human-Level AI's Killer Application: Interactive Computer Games," and has conducted computer games research.

In March of 2008, Dr. Laird presented on Soar at AGI-08: The First Conference on Artificial General Intelligence. His talk was entitled "Extending the Soar Cognitive Architecture," and gave both an overview of the system along with a summary of its recent extensions. In January of 2009, he presented at the Decade of the Mind IV conference in Santa Ana Pueblo, New Mexico on the subject of understanding, healing and protecting the mind. He is scheduled to deliver a pre-conference tutorial on the Soar cognitive architecture at AGI-09 in March of 2009.

Dr. Laird served as a member of research staff at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center from 1984 to 1986. He received his B.S. from the University of Michigan in 1975 and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1983. His thesis advisor was Allen Newell, the computer science and cognitive psychology researcher.

video


Extending the Soar Cognitive Architecture

transcript

AGI-08, Extending the Soar Cognitive Architecture