Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

A Cognitive Architecture for
Simulating Bodies and Minds

Professor Sergei Nirenburg
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

1:00-2:15pm Friday, 18 February 2011, ITE 227, UMBC

This talk is an overview of a cognitive architecture that supports the creation and deployment of intelligent agents capable of simulating human-like abilities. The agents, have a simulated mind and may also be supplied with a simulated body. These agents are intended to operate as members of multi-agent teams featuring both artificial and human agents. The agent architecture and its underlying knowledge resources and processors are being developed in a sufficiently generic way to support a variety of applications. In this talk we briefly describe the architecture and two proof-of-concept application systems we have developed within it: the Maryland Virtual Patient (MVP) system for training medical personnel and the CLinician’s ADvisor (CLAD).We organize the discussion around four specific aspects of agent capabilities implemented in MVP and CLAD: physiological simulation, knowledge management and learning, decision-making and language processing.

This is joint work with Marjorie McShane and Stephen Beale, with contributions from Jesse English, Ben Johnson, Bryan Wilkinson and Roberta Catizone.

Sergei Nirenburg is Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering of UMBC and Director of its Institute for Language and Information Technologies (ILIT). He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. Dr. Nirenburg has written or edited seven books and has published over 180 refereed articles in various areas of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. His research interests cover a variety of topics in AI, cognitive modeling and natural language processing (machine translation, computational semantics, computational lexicography, natural language analysis and generation, knowledge acquisition and intelligent interfaces). In 1987-96 he served as Editor-in-Chief of Machine Translation. He is a member of the International Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL). He has founded and has been Steering Committee Chair (1985-2007) of a series of 11 scientific conferences on theoretical and methodological issues in machine translation.

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