Stuart C. Shapiro
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
State University of New York at Buffalo

Research Interests

Stuart C. Shapiro's primary research area is the computational understanding of human-level cognitive abilities, specifically the abilities that underly natural-language use, reasoning, and rational acting. He is interested in discovering how to build, and then actually building, a computerized rational agent---a computer system that is capable of conversing in English about various every-day and specialized topics, including how to perform behaviors within its repertoire; that is capable of being taught about such subjects by instruction carried out in English, possibly with the aid of gestures, drawings and diagrams; that is then capable of reasoning about those subjects, discussing them with humans, and performing as instructed. Recently, he has been experimenting with embodying an agent in hardware and software-simulated robots operating in the real world and in simulated worlds, and investigating the implications of embodiment on knowledge representation and reasoning. Shapiro conducts his research in conjunction with his colleagues and students in the SNePS Research Group and in the Center for Cognitive Science. Their research is both theoretical and experimental, designing, building and using successive versions of the SNePS knowledge representation, reasoning, and acting system, and successive versions of Cassie, a computational cognitive agent implemented in SNePS. He is also interested in the philosophical bases of Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, and Computer Science, which he considers to be the science of procedures.
Stuart C. Shapiro <shapiro@cse.buffalo.edu>