Leadership

The Center for Integrated Cognition was launched in March 2021. Our goal is to pursue basic research on the integration of the breadth of cognitive capabilities found in end-to-end intelligent agents. These capabilities include but are not limited to, perception, action, multiple types of reasoning, planning, metacognition, communication and coordination with other agents with language, and learning robustly and flexibly from their experiences with the world, interactions with other agents, and their own internal reasoning. Our research involves developing knowledge-rich adaptive agents that incorporate these capabilities, as well as the underlying cognitive architecture that supports them.

While we have decades of experience and accomplishment in academia and for-profit industry AI research, we decided that the best way for us to pursue long-term, integrative research is via an independent research institute. We are excited about potential research collaborations on integrated cognition with other research groups from academia, government, and commercial sectors.

The CIC is partnered with the IQM Research Institute (https://iqmri.org/), a mature research organization based in Ann Arbor, MI. IQMRI provides applied Science and Technology Research and Development for commercial and government sponsors. IQMRI’s existing processes and infrastructure allow the CIC team to focus on research activities.

John Laird • Co-Director/ Principal Cognitive Architect

John E. Laird is the Principal Cognitive Architect and co-Director of the Center for Integrated Cognition (CIC). Dr. Laird’s interests spring from a desire to understand the nature of the architecture underlying artificial and natural intelligence and include creating intelligent autonomous agents that use a wide variety of cognitive capabilities as well as extending the Soar cognitive architecture and the Common Model of Cognition. He is the John L. Tishman Emeritus Professor of Engineering at the University of Michigan where he was a faculty for 36 years. He is a founder of Soar Technology and Chair of its Board of Directors. He is a Fellow of AAAI, ACM, AAAS, and the Cognitive Science Society. He is the 2020 winner of the Stephen S. Attwood, Excellence in Engineering Award, University of Michigan. In 2018, he was co-winner of the Herbert A. Simon Prize for Advances in Cognitive Systems with Paul Rosenbloom.

Bob Wray • Co-Director/ Principal Scientist

Robert E. Wray is Principal Scientist and co-Director of the Center for Integrated Cognition (CIC). At the CIC, Dr. Wray leads research focused on research and development of capable, robust, and adaptive autonomous systems that naturally interact with and learn from humans. His research focus bridges basic and applied research areas and his research has led to innovations that are now in everyday use.