Roger Schank

Roger Schank (* 1946) is president and CEO of Socratic Arts, and a leading visionary in artificial intelligence.

Career

Schank was formerly professor of computer science and psychology at Yale University and director of the Yale Artificial Intelligence Project. In 1989 he was hired by Northwestern University to found the Institute of Learning Sciences, that later was absorbed by the School of Education as a separate department, and helped found the Center for the Learning Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. He founded Learning Sciences Corporation (later Cognitive Arts) as the commercial arm of ILS, and led it until it was sold in 2003. In 2005, Schank was appointed chief learning officer of Donald Trump's Trump University.

Influence

Schank was one of the influential early contributors to artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology in the 1970s and 1980s. Schank's major innovations in these fields were his concepts of case based reasoning and dynamic memory. Both of these were opposed to more traditional views of memory and reasoning in the field. The classic cognitivist view of cognition popular at the time viewed cognition as being the rule (or algorithm) bound manipulation of symbols. Schank on the other hand stated that memory was in the form of meaningful 'stories' (not merely inert decontextualized information) and that problem solving progressed by using 'cases' or examples stored in memory. So for example, in the 'classical' view, when we walk to the store, we accomplish this because we have access to a stored algorithm that tells us 'step one, open door, step two, step into street' and so on. In Schank's view on the other hand, we accomplish this because we have access to a stored 'schema' based on previous experience of what it is like to walk to the store, and we don't need rules to describe this. Schank and his students at Yale initially applied these ideas to the problem of computer recognition of English (called natural language understanding) in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but progress eventually stalled and those methods fell into disuse.

Works

• Roger C. Schank and Robert P. Abelson, Scripts, plans, goals and understanding: an inquiry into human knowledge structures, Hillsdale, 1977. ISBN 0-470-99033-3.
• Roger Schank, Tell Me A Story: a new look at real and artificial memory, Scribners, 1990. People learn very easily from stories -- so easily that they can be taught to firmly believe things that aren't true, as Schank notes in passing.
• Roger Schank, The Connoisseur's Guide to the Mind: How we think, How we learn, and what it means to be intelligent, Summit Books, 1991. A tour de force which explains general ideas of learning, memory, and understanding all in the specific context of Schank's culinary adventures in gourmet wining and dining. Why would you want to know what French weather was like during grape-harvesting in the 1970s? So you can order good wines (relatively) cheap from restaurant wine lists in the late 1980s.
• Roger Schank and Chip Cleary, Engines for Education, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishing, Hillsdale, New Jersey, 1995. Gives specific examples of software built at ILS to implement Schank's ideas about case-based exploratory learning.
• Schank, Roger C., Scrooge Meets Dick and Jane Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001, ISBN 0-805-83877-5.

See also

Robert P. Abelson

External links

• CMU Center for the Learning Sciences
• Cognitive Arts
• Socratic Arts
• EDGE Magazine interview with Roger Schank