Roger Schank

{{Infobox scientist

| name = Roger Schank

| birth_date = {{Birth date|1946|3|12}}

| birth_place = New York City, U.S.

| death_date = {{Death date and age|2023|1|29|1946|3|12}}

| death_place = Shelburne, Vermont, U.S.

| workplaces = {{ublist |Stanford University | Yale University | Carnegie Mellon University | Trump University}}

| alma_mater = {{ublist |Carnegie Mellon University | University of Texas}}

| spouse = {{ublist |{{marriage|Diane Levine||1998|end = div}}|Annie Payeur ({{abbr|m.|married}} {{circa|1999}})}}

| children = 2

| thesis_title = A Conceptual Dependency Representation for a Computer-Oriented Semantics

| thesis_url = https://www.proquest.com/docview/302479013/

| thesis_year = 1969

| doctoral_advisor = Jacob L. Mey

| doctoral_students = {{plainlist|1=

Jaime Carbonell{{mathgenealogy|id=78231}}
Lawrence Hunter{{cite thesis |degree=PhD |first=Lawrence E.|last=Hunter |title=Knowledge acquisition planning: Gaining expertise through experience |publisher=Yale University |date=1989 |author-link= Lawrence Hunter|hdl= 10079/bibid/9838922|oclc=24116492|id={{ProQuest|303852846}}}}
Wendy Lehnert
Robert Wilensky

}}

| website = {{URL|rogerschank.com/}}

}}

Roger Carl Schank (March 12, 1946 – January 29, 2023) was an American artificial intelligence theorist, cognitive psychologist, learning scientist, educational reformer, and entrepreneur. Beginning in the late 1960s, he pioneered conceptual dependency theory (within the context of natural language understanding) and case-based reasoning, both of which challenged cognitivist views of memory and reasoning. He began his career teaching at Yale University and Stanford University. In 1989, Schank was granted $30 million in a ten-year commitment to his research and development by Andersen Consulting, through which he founded the Institute for the Learning Sciences (ILS) at Northwestern University in Chicago.

Early life

Schank was born in Manhattan, New York, in 1946, and he attended Stuyvesant High School.{{cite news|url = https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/20/technology/roger-c-schank-dead.html|title = Roger C. Schank, Theorist of Artificial Intelligence, Dies at 76|last = Lohr|first = Steve|newspaper = The New York Times|date = February 20, 2023|accessdate = February 20, 2023|url-access = limited}}

Academic career

For his undergraduate degree, Schank studied mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University{{cite magazine|last1=Freedman|first1=David|title=The Schank Tank|url=https://www.wired.com/1994/08/schank/|magazine=Wired|access-date=7 April 2018}} in Pittsburgh PA, and later was awarded a PhD in linguistics at the University of Texas in Austin and went on to work in faculty positions at Stanford University and then at Yale University.{{Cite magazine| volume = 2| issue = 8| last = Freedman| first = David H.| title = The Schank Tank| magazine = Wired| access-date = 2011-10-04| date = August 1994| url = https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.08/schank_pr.html}} In 1974, he became professor of computer science and psychology at Yale University. In 1981, Schank became Chairman of Computer Science at Yale and director of the Yale Artificial Intelligence Project.{{cite web|title=Biography: Part 1 of 2|work=RogerSchank.com|url=http://www.rogerschank.com/biography.html|year=2009|access-date=October 9, 2011|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20111006130700/http://www.rogerschank.com/biography.html|archive-date=October 6, 2011}}

In 1989, Schank was granted $30 million in a ten-year commitment to his research and development by Andersen Consulting, allowing him to leave Yale and set up the Institute for the Learning Sciences (ILS) at Northwestern University in Chicago, bringing along 25 of his Yale colleagues.{{cite news|url=https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/northwesterns-new-ai-hotshot/Content?oid=874915|newspaper=Chicago Reader|title=Northwestern's New A.I. Hotshot|first=Harold|last=Henderson|date=December 14, 1989}}{{cite news|first=Glenn|last=Rifkin|title= Andersen Consulting's Culture of 'Clones'|work=New York Times |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1992/09/06/business/andersen-consulting-s-culture-of-clones.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm|date=September 6, 1992|access-date= September 28, 2011}} ILS attracted other corporate sponsors such as IBM and Ameritech, as well as government sponsors such as the U.S. Army, EPA and the National Guard, leading to a focus on the development of educational software, especially in employee training.{{cite web|title=Biography: Part 2 of 2|work=RogerSchank.com|url=http://www.rogerschank.com/biography-part2.html|year=2009|access-date=October 9, 2011|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20111006151508/http://www.rogerschank.com/biography-part2.html|archive-date=October 6, 2011}} ILS was later absorbed by the School of Education as a separate department.

When Carnegie Mellon University's Silicon Valley campus was established in 2002, Schank came to serve as Chief Educational Officer at the institution. He was a Founding Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in 1990.{{Cite web |title=Elected AAAI Fellows |url=https://aaai.org/about-aaai/aaai-awards/the-aaai-fellows-program/elected-aaai-fellows/ |access-date=2023-12-31 |website=AAAI |language=en-US}}

Entrepreneurship

While at Yale in 1979, Schank was among the first to "capitalize on the expected boom"{{cite news|first=Andrew|last=Pollack|work= New York Times|title=Selling artificial intelligence |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1982/09/13/business/selling-artificial-intelligence.html|date=September 13, 1982|access-date=6 October 2011}} in AI when he founded Cognitive Systems, a company that went public in 1986. Schank resigned as chairman and chief executive in 1988 for personal reasons, but stayed as a board member and advisor.{{cite news|title=Top officer resigns at Cognitive Systems|work=New York Times|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1988/06/24/business/business-people-top-officer-resigns-at-cognitive-systems.html|date=June 24, 1988|access-date=September 27, 2011}}

In 1994, Schank founded Cognitive Arts Corporation{{cite web|title=Roger Schank|work=Socratic Arts |url=http://www.socraticarts.com/about.cfm?lead=Roger-Schank|access-date=October 9, 2011}} (originally named Learning Sciences Corporation) to market the software developed at ILS, and led the company until it was sold in 2003.

From 2005 to 2007, Schank was the chief learning officer of Trump University.{{Cite web|url=https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/trump-university-i-state-accreditation-issue-roger-schank|title = Trump University; I was there; state accreditation is not the issue}}

In 2001 he founded Socratic Arts, a company that sells e-learning software to both businesses and schools.

In 2008, Schank built a story-centered curriculum (SCC) at the Business Engineering School of La Salle International Graduate School of Ramon Llull University, Barcelona to teach MBA students to launch their own businesses or to go to work.

In 2012, Schank founded XTOL (Experiential Training Online) which "designs learn-by-doing experiential short courses for use by universities, corporations and professional organizations, as well as Master's programs in partnership with degree-granting universities around the world".{{cite web|title=XTOL (Experiential Training Online)|url=http://www.xtolcorp.com/|access-date=January 21, 2014|website=XTOL Corp|archive-date=May 12, 2022|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220512214732/http://www.xtolcorp.com/|url-status=dead}}

Educational reform

Schank believed that the educational system is fundamentally broken and that software will need to replace conventional teaching methods.{{cite news |last=Green |first=Joshua |date=August 11, 2000 |title=No Lectures or Teachers, Just Software |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/10/technology/no-lectures-or-teachers-just-software.html |access-date=October 10, 2011 |work=The New York Times}} To serve this purpose, he founded Engines for Education in 2001, a not-for-profit organization which designs and implements curricula for primary and secondary schools and hosts the Virtual International Science and Technology Academy (VISTA).

Influence

In 1969 Schank introduced the conceptual dependency theory for natural language understanding.{{Cite conference| pages = 1–3| last = Schank| first = Roger| title = A conceptual dependency parser for natural language| book-title = Proceedings of the 1969 conference on Computational linguistics| location = Sång-Säby, Sweden| year = 1969}} This model, partly based on the work of Sydney Lamb, was extensively used by Schank's students at Yale University, such as Robert Wilensky, Wendy Lehnert, and Janet Kolodner, in a series of models of natural language processing.{{Citation |last1=Schank |first1=Roger C |title=Natural Language Processing: Models of Roger Schank and his Students |date=2006-01-15 |url=https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/0470018860.s00057 |encyclopedia=Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science |editor-last=Nadel |editor-first=Lynn |access-date=2023-06-23 |place=Chichester |publisher=John Wiley & Sons, Ltd |language=en |doi=10.1002/0470018860.s00057 |isbn=978-0-470-01619-0 |last2=Leake |first2=David B}}

Case-based reasoning (CBR) is based on Schank's model of dynamic memoryRoger Schank, Dynamic Memory: A Theory of Learning in Computers and People (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982) and was the basis for the earliest CBR systems: Janet Kolodner's CYRUSJanet Kolodner, "Reconstructive Memory: A Computer Model", Cognitive Science 7 (1983): 4. and Michael Lebowitz's IPP.Michael Lebowitz, "Memory-Based Parsing", Artificial Intelligence 21 (1983), 363–404.

Other schools of CBR and closely allied fields emerged in the 1980s, investigating such topics as CBR in legal reasoning, memory-based reasoning (a way of reasoning from examples on massively parallel machines), and combinations of CBR with other reasoning methods. In the 1990s, interest in CBR grew, as evidenced by the establishment of an International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning in 1995, as well as European, German, British, Italian, and other CBR workshops.

CBR technology has produced a number of successful deployed systems, the earliest being Lockheed's CLAVIER,Bill Mark, "Case-Based Reasoning for Autoclave Management", Proceedings of the Case-Based Reasoning Workshop (1989). a system for laying out composite parts to be baked in an industrial convection oven. CBR has been used extensively in help desk applications such as the Compaq SMART systemTrung Nguyen, Mary Czerwinski, and Dan Lee, "COMPAQ QuickSource: Providing the Consumer with the Power of Artificial Intelligence", in Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (Washington, DC: AAAI Press, 1993), 142–151. and has found a major application area in the health sciences.{{Cite journal| doi = 10.1109/TSMCC.2010.2071862| issn = 1094-6977| volume = 41| issue = 4| pages = 421–434| last = Begum| first = S.| author2 = M. U Ahmed| author3 = P. Funk| author4 = Ning Xiong| author5 = M. Folke| title = Case-Based Reasoning Systems in the Health Sciences: A Survey of Recent Trends and Developments| journal = IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics - Part C: Applications and Reviews| date = July 2011| s2cid = 22441650| url = https://zenodo.org/record/3435685| access-date = 2019-12-08| archive-date = 2023-02-10| archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20230210113931/https://zenodo.org/record/3435685| url-status = dead}}

Personal life and death

Schank was married twice. His first marriage, to Diane Levine, ended when they divorced in 1998; he then married Annie Payeur in or around 1999.{{cite web|url = https://www.paperman.com/en/funerals/2023-2-6-dr--roger-schank|title = Dr. Roger Schank|website = Paperman & Sons|accessdate = February 20, 2023}} He had two children.

Schank had homes in Palm Beach, Florida and Quebec. In Florida, he was a neighbor of Jeffrey Epstein, and attended an artificial intelligence conference sponsored by him on his island in 2002, six years before Epstein was convicted of sex offenses in 2008.{{cite web|url=https://slate.com/technology/2019/08/jeffrey-epstein-science-eugenics-sexual-abuse-researchers.html|title=The "Girls" Were Always Around: What it was like to be a scientist in Jeffrey Epstein's circle|first=Daniel|last=Engber|date=August 2, 2019|magazine=Slate}}{{citation|url=http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2008/08/jeffrey_epsteins_prison_party.html|magazine=New York Magazine|department=The Intelligencer|title=Jeffrey Epstein's Prison Party|date=August 12, 2008}} After the conviction, Schank showed public support for him.

After a period of failing health, Schank died from heart failure under hospice care in Shelburne, Vermont, on January 29, 2023, at the age of 76.

Works

Schank, Roger. Teaching Minds: How Cognitive Science Can Save Our Schools. New York: Teachers College Press, 2011, {{ISBN|978-0-8077-5266-1}} (paper) and {{ISBN|978-0-8077-5267-8}} (hardcover).
Schank, Roger, Dimitris Lyras and Elliot Soloway. The Future of Decision Making: How Revolutionary Software Can Improve the Ability to Decide. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. {{ISBN|978-0-230-10365-8}}
Schank, Roger. Lessons in Learning, e-Learning, and Training: Perspectives and Guidance for the Enlightened Trainer. Pfeiffer, 2005. {{ISBN|0-7879-7666-0}}.
Schank, Roger. Scrooge Meets Dick and Jane. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001, {{ISBN|0-8058-3877-5}}.
Schank, Roger. Dynamic Memory Revisited, 2nd Edition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999, {{ISBN|0-521-63398-2}}.
Schank, Roger, Virtual Learning: A Revolutionary Approach to Building a Highly Skilled Workforce. New York: McGraw Hill 1997. {{ISBN|0-7863-1148-7}}
Schank, Roger and Gary Saul Morson. Tell Me A Story: Narrative and Intelligence. Northwestern Press, 1995. {{ISBN|0-8101-1313-9}}.
Schank, Roger and Chip Cleary, Engines for Education. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995.
Schank, Roger. The Connoisseur's Guide to the Mind: How we think, How we learn, and what it means to be intelligent. Summit Books, 1991.
Schank, Roger. Tell Me A Story: A new look at real and artificial memory. Scribner's, 1990.
Schank, Roger and Peter Childers. The Creative Attitude: Learning to Ask and Answer the Right Questions. MacMillan Publishing Company, 1988, {{ISBN|0-02-607170-3}}.
Schank, Roger. The Cognitive Computer: On Language, Learning and Artificial Intelligence. Reading: Addison Wesley, 1984.
Schank, Roger. Dynamic Memory: A Theory of Learning in Computers and People. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
{{cite book | first1=Roger | last1=Schank | first2=Robert P. | last2=Abelson | author-link=Roger Schank | author2-link=Robert Abelson | title=Scripts, plans, goals and understanding: An inquiry into human knowledge structures | location=New Jersey | publisher=Erlbaum | year=1977 | isbn=0-470-99033-3 }}
Schank, Roger. Conceptualizations underlying natural language. In Computer Models of Thought and Language, R. Schank & K. Colby, eds. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1973.

References

External links

[http://www.rogerschank.com/ Roger Schank's Homepage]
{{Twitter}}
[http://www.socraticarts.com/ Socratic Arts]
[http://www.socraticarts.com/beslasalle/index.html Institute for the Learning Sciences]
[http://www.engines4ed.org/ Engines for Education]
[http://engines4ed.org/about/vista.cfm VISTA (Virtual International Science and Technology Academy)]
[http://www.grandparentgames.com/ Grandparent Games]
{{usurped|1=[https://web.archive.org/web/20090502122028/http://www.imissthatkid.com/ I Miss That Kid]}}
[http://www.milosplace.com/ Milo's Place]
[http://www.cognitivearts.com/ Cognitive Arts] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120904093248/http://www.cognitivearts.com/ |date=2012-09-04 }}
[http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/schank/schank_index.html EDGE Magazine interview with Roger Schank]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20041215042910/http://west.cmu.edu/masters/ls/ CMU Center for the Learning Sciences]
[http://www.xtolcorp.com XTOL Corp] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220512214732/http://www.xtolcorp.com/ |date=2022-05-12 }}