Robotics' Growing Role in Cognitive Science

ABSTRACT:
From the 1950's, the research agenda of cognitive science has been to write programs to perform tasks that require intelligence when performed by people, progressing from easy tasks to ever harder ones. Many of the really hard tasks involve sensory inputs and motor outputs: in particular, require continually reconciling a grossly simplified internal model of reality with sensory feedback from the real external world. The recent rapid progress of robotics now allows us to make this interface between inner and outer worlds a major focus for A.I. research, thereby addressing, with good prospects of success, most of the remaining really hard problems.

SPEAKER BIO:
Herbert A. Simon's research has ranged from computer science to psychology, administration, and economics. The thread of continuity through all his work has been his interest in human decision-making and problem-solving processes, and the implications of these processes for social institutions. In the past 25 years, he has made extensive use of the computer as a tool for both simulating human thinking and augmenting it with artificial intelligence.

Born in 1916 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Simon was educated in political science at the University of Chicago (B.A., 1936, Ph.D., 1943). He has held research and faculty positions at the University of California (Berkeley), Illinois Institute of Technology, and since 1949, Carnegie Mellon University, where he is Richard King Mellon University Professor of Computer Science and Psychology. In 1978, he received the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, and in 1986 the National Medal of Science.

Simon's writings include Administrative Behavior, Human Problem Solving, jointly with Allen Newell, The Sciences of the Artificial, Scientific Discovery, with Pat Langley, Gary Bradshaw, and Jan Zytkow, and Models of My Life (autobiography).

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