On Minds: Reflections of a Cognitive Architect

Описание: Date Presented: 9/25/25
Speaker: Paul Rosenbloom, USC

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Abstract:
Minds are functional entities that enable intelligent behavior.  This talk introduces reflections on the study of minds arising from a multi-decade career focused largely on cognitive architectures—hypotheses concerning the fixed structures and processes that yield a mind, whether natural or artificial.  Cognitive architectures must be integrative, in accommodating the full range of capabilities required of a mind.  They also must be general, in applying across many, if not all, problems and domains.  This breadth of investigation, across a sequence of three architectural lineages—Xaps, Soar, and Sigma—and over many years, has inspired a set of recent reflections concerning: (1) key concepts critical to understanding minds, such as architectures, symbols, and intelligence; (2) the structure of the space of technologies that underlies work on minds, yielding both multi-dimensional maps of technologies and criterial tradeoffs across them; and (3) my decades of work on architectures, along with key aspects of my life, in the form of a personal intellectual memoir that ultimately yields a set of maxims that align with a career, and life, dedicated to seeking insight into mind and its associated disciplines through architectural exploration.

Speaker's Bio:
Paul S. Rosenbloom is a Professor Emeritus in the Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science and the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California (USC).  He earlier had appointments at USC’s Information Sciences Institute, Stanford University, and Carnegie Mellon University.  His research has focused on cognitive architectures (Soar and Sigma in particular); the Common Model of Cognition; and reflections on cognitive architectures, minds, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and computer science.  He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and the Cognitive Science Society.  With John Laird he won the 2018 Herbert A. Simon Prize for Advances in Cognitive Systems.