Roger Schank
Encyclopedia
Roger Schank is an American artificial intelligence
theorist, cognitive psychologist
, learning scientist
, educational reformer, and entrepreneur.
at the University of Texas in Austin and went on to work in faculty positions at Stanford University
and then at Yale University
. In 1974, he became professor of computer science
and psychology
at Yale University. In 1981, Schank became Chairman of Computer Science at Yale and director of the Yale Artificial Intelligence Project.
In 1989, Schank was granted $30 million in a 10-year commitment to his research and development by Andersen Consulting
, allowing him to leave Yale and set up the Institute for the Learning Sciences (ILS) at Northwestern University
in Chicago, bringing along 25 of his Yale colleagues. ILS attracted other corporate sponsors such as IBM
and Ameritech
, as well as government sponsors such as the U.S. Army
, EPA
and the National Guard, leading to a focus on the development of educational software, especially in employee training. ILS was later absorbed by the School of Education as a separate department.
When Carnegie Mellon University's Silicon Valley campus was established in 2002, Schank came to serve as Chief Educational Officer at the institution. In 2005, Schank was appointed chief learning officer of Donald Trump
's Trump University
, where he oversaw the design and implementation of the e-learning curriculum.
In 2008, Schank re-created a facility named Institute of the Learning Sciences as part of the Business Engineering Institute at La Salle, Ramon Llull University
, Barcelona.
In 1994, Schank founded Cognitive Arts Corporation (originally named Learning Sciences Corporation) to market the software developed at ILS, and led the company until it was sold in 2003.
In 2001 he founded Socratic Arts, a company that sells e-learning software to both businesses and schools.
and cognitive psychology
in the 1970s and 1980s. His innovations in these fields were conceptual dependency theory
and case-based reasoning
, both of which challenged cognitivist
views of memory and reasoning.
In 1969 Schank introduced the conceptual dependency theory
for natural language understanding
. This model, partly based on the work of Sydney Lamb
, was extensively used by Schank's students at Yale University
, such as Robert Wilensky, Wendy Lehnert, and Janet Kolodner.
Case-based reasoning (CBR) is based on Schank's model of dynamic memory and was the basis for the earliest CBR systems: Janet Kolodner's CYRUS and Michael Lebowitz's IPP.
Other schools of CBR and closely allied fields emerged in the 1980s, investigating such topics as CBR in legal reasoning, memory-based reasoning (a way of reasoning from examples on massively parallel machines), and combinations of CBR with other reasoning methods. In the 1990s, interest in CBR grew, as evidenced by the establishment of an International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning in 1995, as well as European, German, British, Italian, and other CBR workshops.
CBR technology has produced a number of successful deployed systems, the earliest being Lockheed's CLAVIER, a system for laying out composite parts to be baked in an industrial convection oven. CBR has been used extensively in help desk
applications such as the Compaq SMART system and has found a major application area in the health sciences.
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
theorist, cognitive psychologist
Cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology is a subdiscipline of psychology exploring internal mental processes.It is the study of how people perceive, remember, think, speak, and solve problems.Cognitive psychology differs from previous psychological approaches in two key ways....
, learning scientist
Learning sciences
The term Learning Sciences refers to an interdisciplinary field that works to further scientific understanding of learning as well as to engage in the design and implementation of learning innovations, and improvement of instructional methodologies...
, educational reformer, and entrepreneur.
Academic career
Schank was awarded a PhD in linguisticsLinguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
at the University of Texas in Austin and went on to work in faculty positions at Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
and then at Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
. In 1974, he became professor of computer science
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...
and psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
at Yale University. In 1981, Schank became Chairman of Computer Science at Yale and director of the Yale Artificial Intelligence Project.
In 1989, Schank was granted $30 million in a 10-year commitment to his research and development by Andersen Consulting
Accenture
Accenture plc is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company headquartered in Dublin, Republic of Ireland. It is the largest consulting firm in the world and is a Fortune Global 500 company. As of September 2011, the company had more than 236,000 employees across...
, allowing him to leave Yale and set up the Institute for the Learning Sciences (ILS) at Northwestern University
Northwestern University
Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois, USA. Northwestern has eleven undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools offering 124 undergraduate degrees and 145 graduate and professional degrees....
in Chicago, bringing along 25 of his Yale colleagues. ILS attracted other corporate sponsors such as IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
and Ameritech
Ameritech
AT&T Teleholdings, Inc., formerly known as Ameritech Corporation , was a U.S. telecommunications company that arose out of the 1984 AT&T divestiture. Ameritech was one of the seven Regional Bell Operating Companies that was created following the breakup of the Bell System...
, as well as government sponsors such as the U.S. Army
United States Army
The United States Army is the main branch of the United States Armed Forces responsible for land-based military operations. It is the largest and oldest established branch of the U.S. military, and is one of seven U.S. uniformed services...
, EPA
United States Environmental Protection Agency
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is an agency of the federal government of the United States charged with protecting human health and the environment, by writing and enforcing regulations based on laws passed by Congress...
and the National Guard, leading to a focus on the development of educational software, especially in employee training. ILS was later absorbed by the School of Education as a separate department.
When Carnegie Mellon University's Silicon Valley campus was established in 2002, Schank came to serve as Chief Educational Officer at the institution. In 2005, Schank was appointed chief learning officer of Donald Trump
Donald Trump
Donald John Trump, Sr. is an American business magnate, television personality and author. He is the chairman and president of The Trump Organization and the founder of Trump Entertainment Resorts. Trump's extravagant lifestyle, outspoken manner and role on the NBC reality show The Apprentice have...
's Trump University
Trump University
The Trump Entrepreneur Initiative is an online education company owned and founded by real estate businessman Donald J. Trump, Sr. It is part of the Trump Organization. It offers courses in real estate, asset management, entrepreneurship, and wealth creation, charging fees ranging from $1500 to...
, where he oversaw the design and implementation of the e-learning curriculum.
In 2008, Schank re-created a facility named Institute of the Learning Sciences as part of the Business Engineering Institute at La Salle, Ramon Llull University
Ramon Llull University
Ramon Llull University is a private university located in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain founded in 1990. Currently it is formed by several different colleges specialized in different topics, most of which are located in downtown Barcelona...
, Barcelona.
Entrepreneurship
While at Yale in 1979, Schank was among the first to "capitalize on the expected boom" in AI when he founded Cognitive Systems, a company that went public in 1986. Schank resigned as chairman and chief executive in 1988 for personal reasons, but stayed as a board member and advisor.In 1994, Schank founded Cognitive Arts Corporation (originally named Learning Sciences Corporation) to market the software developed at ILS, and led the company until it was sold in 2003.
In 2001 he founded Socratic Arts, a company that sells e-learning software to both businesses and schools.
Educational reform
Schank believes that the educational system is fundamentally broken and that software will need to replace conventional teaching methods. To serve this purpose, he founded Engines for Education in 2001, a not-for-profit organization which designs and implements curricula for primary and secondary schools and hosts the Virtual International Science and Technology Academy (VISTA).Influence
Schank was a leading pioneer of artificial intelligenceArtificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
and cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology is a subdiscipline of psychology exploring internal mental processes.It is the study of how people perceive, remember, think, speak, and solve problems.Cognitive psychology differs from previous psychological approaches in two key ways....
in the 1970s and 1980s. His innovations in these fields were conceptual dependency theory
Conceptual dependency theory
Conceptual dependency theory is a model of natural language understanding used in artificial intelligence systems.Roger Schank at Stanford University introduced the model in 1969, in the early days of artificial intelligence...
and case-based reasoning
Case-based reasoning
Case-based reasoning , broadly construed, is the process of solving new problems based on the solutions of similar past problems. An auto mechanic who fixes an engine by recalling another car that exhibited similar symptoms is using case-based reasoning...
, both of which challenged cognitivist
Cognitivism (psychology)
In psychology, cognitivism is a theoretical framework for understanding the mind that came into usage in the 1950s. The movement was a response to behaviorism, which cognitivists said neglected to explain cognition...
views of memory and reasoning.
In 1969 Schank introduced the conceptual dependency theory
Conceptual dependency theory
Conceptual dependency theory is a model of natural language understanding used in artificial intelligence systems.Roger Schank at Stanford University introduced the model in 1969, in the early days of artificial intelligence...
for natural language understanding
Natural language understanding
Natural language understanding is a subtopic of natural language processing in artificial intelligence that deals with machine reading comprehension....
. This model, partly based on the work of Sydney Lamb
Sydney Lamb
Sydney MacDonald Lamb is an American linguist and professor at Rice University, whose stratificational grammar is a significant alternative theory to Chomsky's transformational grammar....
, was extensively used by Schank's students at Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
, such as Robert Wilensky, Wendy Lehnert, and Janet Kolodner.
Case-based reasoning (CBR) is based on Schank's model of dynamic memory and was the basis for the earliest CBR systems: Janet Kolodner's CYRUS and Michael Lebowitz's IPP.
Other schools of CBR and closely allied fields emerged in the 1980s, investigating such topics as CBR in legal reasoning, memory-based reasoning (a way of reasoning from examples on massively parallel machines), and combinations of CBR with other reasoning methods. In the 1990s, interest in CBR grew, as evidenced by the establishment of an International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning in 1995, as well as European, German, British, Italian, and other CBR workshops.
CBR technology has produced a number of successful deployed systems, the earliest being Lockheed's CLAVIER, a system for laying out composite parts to be baked in an industrial convection oven. CBR has been used extensively in help desk
Help desk
A help desk is an information and assistance resource that troubleshoots problems with computers or similar products. Corporations often provide help desk support to their customers via a toll-free number, website and e-mail. There are also in-house help desks geared toward providing the same kind...
applications such as the Compaq SMART system and has found a major application area in the health sciences.
Works
- Schank, Roger. Lessons in Learning, e-Learning, and Training: Perspectives and Guidance for the Enlightened Trainer. Pfeiffer, 2005. ISBN 0787976660.
- Schank, Roger. Scrooge Meets Dick and Jane. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001, ISBN 0-805-83877-5.
- Schank, Roger. Dynamic Memory Revisited, 2nd Edition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999, ISBN 0521633982.
- Schank, Roger and Gary Saul MorsonGary Saul MorsonGary Saul Morson is an American literary critic and Slavist, currently Frances Hooper Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University. He was Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania for many years prior to leaving for...
. Tell Me A Story: Narrative and Intelligence. Northwestern University Press, 1995. ISBN 0810113139. - Schank, Roger and Chip Cleary, Engines for Education. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995.
- Schank, Roger. The Connoisseur's Guide to the Mind: How we think, How we learn, and what it means to be intelligent. Summit Books, 1991.
- Schank, Roger. Tell Me A Story: A new look at real and artificial memory. Scribners, 1990.
- Schank, Roger. The Cognitive Computer: On Language, Learning and Artificial Intelligence. Reading: Addison Wesley, 1984.
- Schank, Roger. Dynamic Memory: A Theory of Learning in Computers and People. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
- Schank, Roger and Robert P. Abelson. Scripts, plans, goals and understanding: An inquiry into human knowledge structures, Erlbaum, 1977. ISBN 0-470-99033-3.
- Schank, Roger. Conceptualizations underlying natural language. In Computer Models of Thought and Language, R. Schank & K. Colby, eds. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1973.
External links
- Roger Schank's Homepage
- @rogerschank Roger Schank's Twitter feed
- Socratic Arts
- Institute for the Learning Sciences
- Engines for Education
- VISTA (Virtual International Science and Technology Academy)
- Grandparent Games
- I Miss That Kid
- Milo's Place
- Cognitive Arts
- EDGE Magazine interview with Roger Schank
- CMU Center for the Learning Sciences