- John E. Laird
John E. Laird (born
March 16 ,1954 inAnn Arbor ,Michigan ) is a computer scientist who, with Paul Rosenbloom andAllen Newell , created the Soar cognitive architecture atCarnegie Mellon University . Laird is a Professor of the Computer Science and Engineering Division of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of theUniversity of Michigan . He was the director of theArtificial Intelligence Laboratory there from 1994 to 1999.Professional History
John Laird received a BS in Communication and Computer Science from the University of Michigan in 1975 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1983. His Ph.D. thesis advisor was
Allen Newell . Laird was a researcher atXerox PARC in the Intelligent Systems Laboratory from 1984 to 1986; in 1986 he joined the faculty at the University of Michigan.Laird has continued to do research on architectures of the mind and to develop and evolve the Soar architecture since his time at CMU. He is a key speaker at the annual Soar workshop and participates in the international Soar Research Group. In 1998 he co-founded Soar Technology [http://www.soartech.com] , a company that specializes in creating autonomous AI entities based on Soar; he currently serves on its Board of Directors. His particular research interests are reinforcement learning, episodic memory, semantic memory, and emotion-inspired processing. He is a Fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence.
Publications
* [http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/soar/sitemaker/docs/misc/GentleIntroduction-2006.pdf A Gentle Introduction to Soar, an Architecture for Human Cognition, 2006 Update] , with Jill Fain Lehman and Paul Rosenbloom (2006)
* 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
# [http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/laird/bio.html Professional History on University of Michigan Website]
# [http://www.soartech.com/company.history.php Soar Technology company history]External links
* [http://sitemaker.umich.edu/soar/home SOAR project home page]
* [http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/laird/ John E. Laird's Home Page]
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.