I am a Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC) and former Director for Cognitive Architecture Research at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies.
Over most of my career, my research focused on understanding and building human-like minds, with work on cognitive architectures that were grounded in both artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive science. More recently this research has extended to include more abstract methodologies for understanding minds, as well as comparably abstract approaches to understanding their encompassing disciplines (in particular, AI, cognitive science, and computing).
More details on all of this work can be found on my Bio, CV and Past Research page, on my Recent Publications page, and in two versions of a Memoir. The full personal intellectual memoir includes not only an intellectual theme – of seeking insight into mind and its encompassing disciplines via architectural exploration – that provides its overall focus, but also short descriptions of some of my other research and a smattering of more personal items. A reduced-in-scope intellectual memoir will be published soon, but a prepublication version can be found at the same link. You can also check out the Interviews tab, which includes a new one, as of January 2023, partially based on my memoir.
Most of my current effort is spent in drafting a new book for MIT Press – On Minds: Reflections of a Cognitive Architect – based on the more abstract approaches to understanding mind and a third variant of my memoir, and on further developing the Common Model of Cognition – one particular such abstract approach – with John Laird (Center for Integrated Cognition, IQMRI), Christian Lebiere (Carnegie Mellon University), Andrea Stocco (University of Washington), and the larger research community as feasible.