Ron Sun, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA Title: Hybrid Cognitive Architecture: Creativity, Personality, and Social Interaction

Abstract: Hybrid systems have seen significant growth in the recent decades, and have shown solid promise. However, instead of ad hoc development of application-specific systems, it may be advantageous to develop cognitively motivated generic models, that is, cognitive architectures. Hybrid cognitive architectures utilize both neural and symbolic representations and mechanisms, and are more powerful in many ways. In this talk, I will focus on a hybrid cogntiive architecture developed over the past decade and a half, CLARION. In this (dual-process) cognitive architecture, the interaction between implicit and explicit cognitive processes is emphasized. Through the architecture, various psychological effects of the interaction between the two types of processes have been accounted for, which helps to better understand cognition. Thus far, CLARION has been capturing a wide range of quantitative human behavioral data. Many new simulations have been conducted and new human experiments have generated relevant data, including in the areas of human creativity, personality, and cognitive social simulation, all of which further validate the cognitive architecture, and its focus on the dual processes of and the interaction between the implicit and the explicit.

Bio Sketch: Ron Sun is Professor of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and formerly the James C. Dowell Professor of Engineering and Professor of Computer Science at University of Missouri-Columbia. His research interest centers around the study of cognition, especially in the areas of cognitive architectures, human reasoning and learning, cognitive social simulation, and hybrid connectionist-symbolic models. For his paper on integrating rule-based and connectionist models for accounting for human everyday reasoning, he received the 1991 David Marr Award from Cognitive Science Society. For his work on human skill learning, he received the 2008 Hebb Award from the International Neural Network Society. He is the founding co-editor-in-chief of the journal Cognitive Systems Research, and also serves on the editorial boards of many other journals. He is the general chair and the program chair of CogSci 2006, and the program chair of IJCNN 2007. He is a member of the Governing Boards of Cognitive Science Society and International Neural Networks Society. His URL is: http://www.cogsci.rpi.edu/~rsun