Recognizing a lifetime of achievement in cognitive systems

John Laird, the John L. Tishman Professor of Engineering, has been awarded the 2018 Herbert A. Simon Prize for Advances in Cognitive Systems along with his collaborator Prof. Paul Rosenbloom of the University of Southern California. This award recognizes the pair's research on cognitive architectures, especially their Soar project, their applications to knowledge-based systems and models of human cognition, and their contributions to theories of representation, reasoning, problem solving, and learning. The recipients, the awarding committee writes, have been "energetic contributors to AI and cognitive science" for over 30 years. Laird's and Rosenbloom's interdisciplinary and integrative research, both jointly and individually, has addressed many facets of high-level cognition, and their contributions to Soar have helped create one of the industry's most successful tools for developing intelligent systems. Soar is a general cognitive architecture for developing systems that exhibit intelligent behavior.