John E. Laird (born March 16, 1954, in

Ann Arbor Ann Arbor is a city in Washtenaw County, Michigan, United States, and its county seat. The 2020 United States census, 2020 census recorded its population to be 123,851, making it the List of municipalities in Michigan, fifth-most populous cit ...

Michigan Michigan ( ) is a peninsular U.S. state, state in the Great Lakes region, Great Lakes region of the Upper Midwest, Upper Midwestern United States. It shares water and land boundaries with Minnesota to the northwest, Wisconsin to the west, ...

) is a computer scientist who created the Soar cognitive architecture at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...

with Paul Rosenbloom and

Allen Newell Allen Newell (March 19, 1927 – July 19, 1992) was an American researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND Corporation and at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, Tepper School of Business, and D ...

. Laird is a professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Division of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of the

University of Michigan The University of Michigan (U-M, U of M, or Michigan) is a public university, public research university in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States. Founded in 1817, it is the oldest institution of higher education in the state. The University of Mi ...

Education and career

John Laird received a BS in Communication and Computer Science from the

in 1975 and a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1983. His Ph.D. thesis advisor was

. Laird was a researcher at

Xerox PARC Future Concepts division (formerly Palo Alto Research Center, PARC and Xerox PARC) is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. It was founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, as a div ...

in the Intelligent Systems Laboratory from 1984 to 1986; in 1986, he joined the faculty at the University of Michigan. Laird has continued to research architectures of the mind and to develop and evolve the Soar architecture since his time at CMU. He organizes the annual Soar workshop and participates in the international Soar Research Group. In 1998, he co-founded Soar Technology, a company specializing in creating autonomous AI entities based on Soar; he currently serves on its board of directors. His research interests include cognitive architecture, problem-solving, learning, reinforcement learning, episodic memory, semantic memory, and emotion-inspired processing. He is a Fellow of ACM, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the Cognitive Science Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Publications

The Soar Cognitive Architecture
Laird, J. E., 2012, MIT Press. * The Soar Papers: Readings on Integrated Intelligence, Rosenbloom, Laird, and Newell (1993) * Soar: An Architecture for General Intelligence, ''Artificial Intelligence'', 33: 1-64. Laird, Rosenbloom, Newell, John and Paul, Allen (1987)

References

Soar Technology

External links

Soar project home page

John E. Laird's Home Page
1954 births Living people American computer scientists University of Michigan faculty University of Michigan alumni Carnegie Mellon University alumni Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Fellows of the Cognitive Science Society 2006 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery {{US-compu-bio-stub