News
CIC at Advances in Cognitive Systems 2026
Staff from CIC are headed to Edinburgh for Advances in Cognitive Systems. Our team has two oral presentations and a poster at the conference! Bob Wray will present a John-Laird-authored paper on the cognitive capabilities agents need to earn individual users' trust....
Dr. James Kirk Promoted to Lead Scientist!
The CIC is thrilled to announce that Dr. James Kirk has been promoted to Lead Scientist at the CIC. Lead Scientists lead individual projects and develop their own research portfolios. James has played a key role in defining technical opportunities for CIC and leading...
Frontiers article on STARS, neurosymbolic approach to agent task learning
CIC's work on STARS, a neurosymbolic approach that mines world knowledge from an LLM when a Soar agent is learning new tasks, has been published in Frontiers in Computer Science. The paper describes STARS, the system we introduced in a AAAI24 paper, and our latest...
CIC at AGI 2026
John Laird presented a new paper at AGI 2026. "Unified, Comprehensive Metacognition within the Common Model of Cognition" proposes the addition of metacognition, or "reasoning about any and all aspects of an agent’s cognition," to the Common Model of Cognition.
CIC at Cognitive Science 2026
Bob Wray presented an invited talk at a workshop at Cognitive Science 2026. The workshop, Laying the foundations for foundation models of cognition, focused on how foundation models could inform and advance cognitive modeling, and what might be required to build...
2026 Soar Workshop Schedule
This year's Soar Workshop will be on 6 May. The schedule for the workshop is below. The workshop will be hybrid, with on-site participation in Ann Arbor, MI (1690 Beyster Building on University of Michigan’s North Campus) and remote via Zoom. The workshop is free. If...
CIC’s Steven Jones at AAAI 2026!
Steven Jones presented the CIC's paper on Requirements for Aligned, Dynamic Conflict Resolution at AAAI-26, the annual conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. AAAI was an energizing opportunity to share CIC's latest research with...
CIC AAAI Paper on what agents need to resolve open-world, dynamic conflicts
The CIC is excited to share that a CIC paper, "Requirements for Aligned, Dynamic Resolution of Conflicts in Operational Constraints," has been accepted for oral presentation at AAAI26 (Alignment track). The authors are Steven Jones, Bob Wray, and John Laird (full...
Applying Cognitive Design Patterns to General LLM Agents
Wray, R. E., Kirk, J. R., & Laird, J. E. (2025). Applying Cognitive Design Patterns to General LLM Agents. Proceedings of the Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) Conference. Artificial General Intelligence, Reykjavik. (preprint version of conference paper:...
Requirements for Recognition and Rapid Response to Unfamiliar Events Outside of Agent Design Scope
Wray, R. E., Jones, S. J., & Laird, J. E. (2025). Requirements for Recognition and Rapid Response to Unfamiliar Events Outside of Agent Design Scope. Proceedings of the Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) Conference. Artificial General Intelligence, Reykjavik....