Paul S. Rosenbloom

Biography

I am a Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Southern California (USC) and Director for Cognitive Architecture Research at USC's Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT). I was at USC's Information Sciences Institute (ISI) for twenty years, most recently as its Deputy Director. Prior to coming to USC in 1987, I was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Psychology at Stanford University from 1984 to 1987, and a Research Computer Scientist at Carnegie Mellon University from 1983 to 1984. I received a B.S. degree in Mathematical Sciences (with distinction) from Stanford University in 1976 and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1978 and 1983, respectively.

From 1983 until 1998, I was a co-PI of the Soar Project, a multi-disciplinary, multi-site attempt to develop, understand, and apply a cognitive architecture that models the fixed structures and processes that yield a mind, whether natural or artificial, and that is thus capable of supporting general intelligence. Research on Soar spanned areas such as machine learning, problem solving and planning, production systems, intelligent agents, virtual humans, multi-agent systems, knowledge-based systems, neural networks, and cognitive modeling. The most significant applications were intelligent automated pilots and commanders for synthetic battlespaces, as deployed in Synthetic Theater of War '97 (STOW-97).

From 1998 until 2007 my focus shifted to exploring new directions in computing and related fields for ISI, such as blending entertainment and computing for military training (where I helped to found ICT); virtual organizations of robots, agents and people; responding to the unexpected; high performance computing, scalable distributed computing, and computational science; biomedical informatics; automated construction (where I was Deputy Director of the Center for Rapid Automated Fabrication Technologies – CRAFT); and technology and the arts.

I am a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI); the American Association for the Advancement of Science; and the Cognitive Science Society. With John laird (University of Michigan), I was awarded the Herbert A. Simon Prize for Advances in Cognitive Systems. I have served as Chair of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence (SIGART) [now SIGAI], Councillor and Conference Chair of the AAAI, and Program Co-Chair of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-92). During 2017-2018 I served as the president of USC's faculty, and subsequently received the USC Distinguished Faculty Service award. I also received the USC Phi Kappa Phi Faculty Recognition Award (for the book On Computing).