AI Seminar
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Tuesday, September 27th, 2005
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
175 ATL (Large Conference Room)

"The Cognitive Architecture Approach to AI Research"
Prof John Laird
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
University of Michigan

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Soar is a cognitive architecture that has been under development for 
close to 25 years. Recently, we have begun a set of major architectural 
extensions to Soar including reinforcement learning, episodic memory, 
semantic memory, emotion, and visualization/imagery. The goal of these 
extensions is to greatly enhance Soar's ability to support human-level 
behavior. In this talk I will describe our plans for the integration of 
these components with special emphasis on the methodology we have 
adopted. The goal of our methodology is to avoid depending on great 
moments of insight to move the work along, but instead define a process 
that deliberately (but not necessarily slowly) moves the research 
forward.  Our methodology includes an analysis phase where we attempt to 
determine functional, behavioral, structural, computational, and 
integrative constraints for each architectural extension.  We then 
attempt to develop a conceptual framework that defines the space of 
possible designs for each extension. Each framework is used as a 
generator for possible designs, which are then evaluated based on our 
requirements, followed by prototype implementations, further evaluation, 
new designs, and so on.