The
Third
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"Roger Schank has pioneered many important ideas about how knowledge might be represented in the human mind. In the early 1970s, he developed a concept of semantics that he called "conceptual dependency," which plays an important role in my book The Society of Mind. He's also developed other paradigms, involving representing knowledge in various types of networks, scripts, and storylike forms."
- Marvin Minsky

"The Roger Schank I knew was a thorn in everybody's side — constructively so. The interesting thing about Roger Schank, something he shares with Minsky, is the fact that he's produced an incredible string of students. Anybody who's produced such a great string of students has to be a constructive pain in the ass. He's always taken an adversarial stance in his theories. He doesn't just say, "Here's my theory." He says, "Here's why I'm right and everybody else is an idiot." He's often right."
-
W. Daniel Hillis

"I've always relished Schank's role as a gadfly and as a naysayer, a guerrilla in the realm of cognitive science, always asking big questions, always willing to discard his own earlier efforts and say they were radically incomplete for interesting reasons. He's a gadfly and a good one."
- Daniel C. Dennett

Roger Schank

Roger Schank, is currently Distinguished Career Professor at the School of Computer Science, Carnegie-Mellon University, and Chief Education Officer, Carnegie Mellon West.

He is the former Chairman and Chief Technology Officer for Cognitive Arts and was the founding Director of the Institute for the Learning Sciences at Northwestern University since its founding in 1989. He held three faculty appointments at Northwestern University as John Evans Professor of Computer Science, Education, and Psychology.

Previously, he was Professor of Computer Science and Psychology at Yale University and Director of the Yale Artificial Intelligence Project.ÝHe was also a visiting professor at the University of Paris VII, a faculty member at Stanford University, and research fellow at the Institute for Semantics and Cognition in Switzerland.

In addition, Dr. Schank is a fellow of the AAAI, the founder of the Cognitive Science Society, and co-founder of the Journal of Cognitive Science.

One of the world's leading Artificial Intelligence researchers, Dr. Schank is the author of more than 125 articles and publications.Ý His books include: Dynamic Memory: A Theory of Learning in Computers and People , Tell Me a Story: A New Look at Real and Artificial Memory, The Connoisseur's Guide to the Mind, and Engines for Education. His newest book is Virtual Learning: A Revolutionary Approach to Building a Highly Skilled Workforce.


Further reading on Edge:"Information is Surprises" — in The Third Culture
"The Disrespected Student — or — The Need for the Virtual University": A Talk with Roger Schank.