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>