Roger Carl Schank (born 1946) is an American
artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...
theorist,
cognitive psychologist
Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning.
Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism, which he ...
,
learning scientist, educational reformer, and
entrepreneur
Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value. With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is normally encountered in starting a business, which may include other values th ...
.
Beginning in the late 1960s, he pioneered
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. This model was exten ...
(within the context of
natural language understanding
Natural-language understanding (NLU) or natural-language interpretation (NLI) is a subtopic of natural-language processing in artificial intelligence that deals with machine reading comprehension. Natural-language understanding is considered an ...
) and
case-based reasoning
In artificial intelligence and philosophy, case-based reasoning (CBR), broadly construed, is the process of solving new problems based on the solutions of similar past problems.
In everyday life, an auto mechanic who fixes an engine by recalli ...
, both of which challenged
cognitivist views of memory and reasoning.
In 1989, Schank was granted $30 million in a 10-year commitment to his research and development by
Andersen Consulting
Accenture plc is an Irish-American professional services company based in Dublin, specializing in information technology (IT) services and consulting. A ''Fortune'' Global 500 company, it reported revenues of $61.6 billion in 2022. Accentur ...
, through which he founded the Institute for the Learning Sciences (ILS) at
Northwestern University
Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston, Illinois. Founded in 1851, Northwestern is the oldest chartered university in Illinois and is ranked among the most prestigious academic institutions in the world.
Charte ...
in Chicago.
Academic career
For his undergraduate degree, Schank studied mathematics at
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...
in
Pittsburgh PA, and later was awarded a PhD in
linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...
at the
University of Texas
The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...
in Austin and went on to work in faculty positions at
Stanford University
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...
and then at
Yale University
Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...
.
In 1974, he became professor of
computer science
Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...
and
psychology
Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries betwe ...
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 plc is an Irish-American professional services company based in Dublin, specializing in information technology (IT) services and consulting. A ''Fortune'' Global 500 company, it reported revenues of $61.6 billion in 2022. Accentur ...
, allowing him to leave Yale and set up the Institute for the Learning Sciences (ILS) at
Northwestern University
Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston, Illinois. Founded in 1851, Northwestern is the oldest chartered university in Illinois and is ranked among the most prestigious academic institutions in the world.
Charte ...
in Chicago, bringing along 25 of his Yale colleagues. ILS attracted other corporate sponsors such as
IBM and
Ameritech
AT&T Teleholdings, Inc., formerly known as Ameritech Corporation (and before that American Information Technologies Corporation), is an American telecommunications company that arose out of the 1984 AT&T divestiture. Ameritech was one of the se ...
, as well as government sponsors such as the
U.S. Army
The United States Army (USA) is the land service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the eight U.S. uniformed services, and is designated as the Army of the United States in the U.S. Constitution.Article II, section 2, cl ...
,
EPA
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is an independent executive agency of the United States federal government tasked with environmental protection matters. President Richard Nixon proposed the establishment of EPA on July 9, 1970; it be ...
and the
National Guard
National Guard is the name used by a wide variety of current and historical uniformed organizations in different countries. The original National Guard was formed during the French Revolution around a cadre of defectors from the French Guards.
Nat ...
,
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.
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.
From 2005 to 2007, Schank was the chief learning officer of
Trump University
Trump University (also known as the Trump Wealth Institute and Trump Entrepreneur Initiative LLC) was an American company that ran a real estate training program from 2005 until 2010. It was owned and operated by The Trump Organization. A sep ...
.
In 2001 he founded Socratic Arts, a company that sells e-learning software to both businesses and schools.
In 2008, Schank built a story-centered curriculum (SCC) at the Business Engineering School of La Salle International Graduate School of
Ramon Llull University
University Ramon Llull ( ca, Universitat Ramon Llull, URL; ) is a private university located in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain established in 1990. Currently it is formed by several different colleges specialized in different topics, most of which ar ...
, Barcelona to teach MBA students to launch their own businesses or to go to work.
In 2012, Schank founded XTOL (Experiential Training Online) which "designs learn-by-doing experiential short courses for use by universities, corporations and professional organizations, as well as Master's programs in partnership with degree-granting universities around the world."
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
In 1969 Schank introduced the
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. This model was exten ...
for
natural language understanding
Natural-language understanding (NLU) or natural-language interpretation (NLI) is a subtopic of natural-language processing in artificial intelligence that deals with machine reading comprehension. Natural-language understanding is considered an ...
. This model, partly based on the work of
Sydney Lamb
Sydney MacDonald Lamb (born May 4, 1929 in Denver, Colorado) is an American linguist and professor at Rice University, whose stratificational grammar is a significant alternative theory to Chomsky's transformational grammar.
He has speciali ...
, was extensively used by Schank's students at
Yale University
Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...
, such as
Robert Wilensky
Robert Wilensky (26 March 1951 – 15 March 2013) was an American computer scientist and emeritus professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information, with his main focus of research in artificial intelligence.
Academic career
In 1971, Wilens ...
, Wendy Lehnert, and
Janet Kolodner
Janet Lynne Kolodner is an American cognitive scientist and learning scientist and Regents' Professor Emerita in the School of Interactive Computing, College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She was Founding Editor in Chie ...
.
Case-based reasoning (CBR) is based on Schank's model of dynamic memory
[Roger Schank, Dynamic Memory: ''A Theory of Learning in Computers and People'' (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982)] and was the basis for the earliest CBR systems:
Janet Kolodner's CYRUS
[Janet Kolodner, "Reconstructive Memory: A Computer Model," ''Cognitive Science'' 7 (1983): 4.] and Michael Lebowitz's IPP.
[Michael Lebowitz, "Memory-Based Parsing," ''Artificial Intelligence'' 21 (1983), 363–404.]
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,
[Bill Mark, "Case-Based Reasoning for Autoclave Management," ''Proceedings of the Case-Based Reasoning Workshop'' (1989).] a system for laying out composite parts to be baked in an industrial convection oven. CBR has been used extensively in
help desk
A help desk is a department or person that provides assistance and information usually for electronic or computer problems. In the mid-1990s, research by Iain Middleton of Robert Gordon University studied the value of an organization's help desk ...
applications such as the Compaq SMART system
[Trung Nguyen, Mary Czerwinski, and Dan Lee, "COMPAQ QuickSource: Providing the Consumer with the Power of Artificial Intelligence," in ''Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence'' (Washington, DC: AAAI Press, 1993), 142–151.] and has found a major application area in the health sciences.
Schank was a neighbor of
Jeffrey Epstein
Jeffrey Edward Epstein ( ; January 20, 1953August 10, 2019) was an American sex offender and financier. Epstein, who was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York City, began his professional life by teaching at the Dalton School in Manhattan, des ...
, and attended an artificial intelligence conference sponsored by him on his island in 2002, several years before Epstein was convicted of sex offenses.
Works
*Schank, Roger. ''Teaching Minds: How Cognitive Science Can Save Our Schools''. New York: Teachers College Press, 2011, (paper) and (hardcover).
*Schank, Roger, Dimitris Lyras and Elliot Soloway. ''The Future of Decision Making: How Revolutionary Software Can Improve the Ability to Decide''. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
*Schank, Roger. ''Lessons in Learning, e-Learning, and Training: Perspectives and Guidance for the Enlightened Trainer''. Pfeiffer, 2005. .
*Schank, Roger. ''Scrooge Meets Dick and Jane''. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001, .
*Schank, Roger. ''Dynamic Memory Revisited'', 2nd Edition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999, .
*Schank, Roger, ''Virtual Learning: A Revolutionary Approach to Building a Highly Skilled Workforce.'' New York: McGraw Hill 1997.
*Schank, Roger and
Gary Saul Morson
Gary Saul Morson (born 1948) is an American literary critic and Slavist. He is particularly known for his scholarly work on the great Russian novelists Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. Morson is Lawren ...
. ''Tell Me A Story: Narrative and Intelligence''. Northwestern Press, 1995. .
*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''. Scribner's, 1990.
*Schank, Roger and Peter Childers. ''The Creative Attitude: Learning to Ask and Answer the Right Questions''. MacMillan Publishing Company, 1988, .
*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. Conceptualizations underlying natural language. In ''Computer Models of Thought and Language'', R. Schank & K. Colby, eds. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1973.
See also
*
Robert P. Abelson Robert Paul Abelson (September 12, 1928 – July 13, 2005) was a Yale University psychologist and political scientist with special interests in statistics and logic.
Biography
He was born in New York City and attended the Bronx High School of Sci ...
References
External links
Roger Schank's Homepage*
Socratic ArtsEngines for EducationVISTA (Virtual International Science and Technology Academy)Grandparent GamesI Miss That KidMilo's PlaceCognitive ArtsCMU Center for the Learning SciencesXTOL Corp
{{DEFAULTSORT:Schank, Roger
1946 births
Living people
Artificial intelligence researchers
History of artificial intelligence
Theoretical computer science
Carnegie Mellon University faculty
Carnegie Mellon University alumni
American scientists