John Laird Recent Publications:

 

This page lists my most recent publications, making them easier to find than searching through my other research web pages.


Soar 9:

·        Laird, J. E. (2008). Extending the Soar Cognitive Architecture. Artificial General Intelligence Conference, Memphis, TN.

Cognitive Architecture:

·        Langley, P., & Laird, J. E. (2002). Cognitive architectures: Research issues and challenges (Technical Report). Institute for the Study of Learning and Expertise, Palo Alto, CA.  We hope to have a published version of this soon (late 2005).

Reinforcement Learning:

We are in the process of adding reinforcement learning to Soar.

·        Wang, Y., and Laird, J.E. 2007. The Importance of Action History in Decision Making and Reinforcement Learning. Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Cognitive Modeling. Ann Arbor, MI. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~yongjiaw/publications/ICCM_2007.pdf

·        Nason, S. and Laird, J. E., Soar-RL, Integrating Reinforcement Learning with Soar, Cognitive Systems Research, 6 (1), 2005, pp. 51-59. Also in International Conference on Cognitive Modeling, 2004.

Spatial Reasoning and Mental Imagery:

·        Lathrop, S.D., and Laird, J.E. (2007). Towards Incorporating Visual Imagery into a Cognitive Architecture. Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Cognitive Modeling. Ann Arbor, MI. http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~slathrop/publications/ICCM07_paper_final.pdf

·        Lathrop, S., and Laird, J.E. 2006. Incorporating Visual Imagery into a Cognitive Architecture: An Initial Theory, Design and Implementation. http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/soar/sitemaker/docs/pubs/cca_tech_report_2006-01.pdf

·        Wintermute, S., and Laird, J. E. (2007). Predicate Projection in a Bimodal Spatial Reasoning System. Proceedings of the 21st National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Vancouver, B.C., Canada.

Episodic Memory:

We are also adding an episodic memory to Soar.

·        Nuxoll, A. M. and Laird, J. E. (2007). Extending Cognitive Architecture with Episodic Memory. In Proceedings of the 21st National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/soar/sitemaker/docs/pubs/AAAI2007_NuxollLaird_ver14(final).pdf

·       Nuxoll, A., Laird, J., A Cognitive Model of Episodic Memory Integrated With a General Cognitive Architecture,  International Conference on Cognitive Modeling 2004.

 

Procedural Learning:

·       Pearson, D. J ., Laird, J. E., “Incremental Learning of Procedural Planning Knowledge in Challenging Environments,” Computational Intelligence, 2005, 21:4, 414

Activation:

We added activation to Soar’s working memory. We built upon the original ACT activation scheme that was then implemented originally in Soar by Ron Chong. Our implementation is completely new and attempts to provide a very efficient implementation so that there is little overhead to use activation. We are initially using the activation for feature selection in the episodic learning work and expect to use it in the reinforcement learning work. Some day we might even use it for forgetting (but not yet).

·       Nuxoll, A., Laird, J., James, M. Comprehensive Working Memory Activation in Soar.  International Conference on Cognitive Modeling, Poster, 2004.

Emotion Modeling:                                              

We are delving into adding a model of emotion to Soar. We initially have developed a framework for how emotion fits in Soar and have tried it on a simple task.

·        Marinier, R.P., Laird, J.E. 2007. Computational Modeling of Mood and Feeling from Emotion. CogSci 2007. Nashville, TN. http://sitemaker.umich.edu/marinier/files/Marinier_Laird_CogSci_2007_ComputationalModeling.pdf

·        Marinier, R. and Laird, J. A Cognitive Architecture Theory of Comprehension and Appraisal. Agent Construction and Emotion 2006, Vienna, Austria, April 2006. http://sitemaker.umich.edu/marinier/files/Marinier_Laird_ACE_2006_ComprehensionAndAppraisal.pdf

·       Marinier, R., Laird, J. Toward a Comprehensive Computational Model of Emotions and Feelings, International Conference on Cognitive Modeling 2004.

Rapid Knowledge Acquisition

Doug Pearson and I have been working on a new was for doing knowledge acquisition that involves scenarios described as diagrams by an expert.

·       Douglas Pearson, John E. Laird, Redux: Example-Driven Diagrammatic Tools for Rapid Knowledge Acquisition, Proceedings of Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation, 2004, Washington, D.C.

Validation

This is Scott Wallace’s thesis research on validation.

·       Wallace. S. A., Laird, J. E. Comparing Agents and Humans Using Behavioral Bounding.  International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-03).

·       Wallace, S. Validating Complex Agent Behavior, Ph.D. Thesis University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 2003.

AI and Computer Games

The first paper describes our work on the HAUNT II game  - a mod to Unreal Tournament that includes Soar characters and a director.  The second two describe our work on hooking Soar up to a real-time strategy game engine.

·       Brian Magerko, John E. Laird, Mazin Assanie, Alex Kerfoot, Devvan Stokes, AI Characters and Directors for Interactive Computer Games, Proceedings of the 2004 Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference, San Jose, CA, July 2004. AAAI Press.

·         Wintermute, S., Xu, J., Irizarry, J., Laird, J.E. 2007. SORTS Tech Report. http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/soar/sitemaker/docs/pubs/sorts_report.pdf

·         Wintermute, S., Xu, J., and Laird, J.E. SORTS: A Human-Level Approach to Real-Time Strategy AI. Proceedings of the Third Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference (AIIDE-07), Stanford, California http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~swinterm/papers/AIIDE07-SORTS.pdf

Interactive Drama Manager

This is Brian Magerko’s thesis research – building a drama manager/director that oversees an interactive game.

·       Magerko, B. and Laird, J. "Building an Interactive Drama Architecture with a High Degree of Interactivity."  1st International Conference on Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment, Darmstadt, Germany, March 2003.

Military Applications

Together with Bob Wray of Soar Technology, we developed an adversary for MOUT training. One issue that we addressed in the research was variability. The second paper is an overview of that project.

·        Wray, R.E., Laird, J. E. (2003) “Variability in Human Behavior Modeling for Military Simulations”, Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation Conference. Scottsdale, AZ.

·        Robert E. Wray, John E. Laird, Andrew Nuxoll, Devvan Stokes, Alex Kerfoot, Synthetic Adversaries for Urban Combat Training, Proceedings of the 2004 Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference, San Jose, CA, July 2004. AAAI Press. Also published in AI Magazine, 26(3):82-92, 2005.



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