The Colloquium Series of the
            Department of Computer Science and
	     Electrical Computer Engineering,
		  University of Wyoming

			presents

                   Dr. Donald Perlis
              Department of Computer Science
                  University of Maryland
                    College Park, MD

"THE METACOGNITIVE LOOP -or- Toward Human-Level Commonsense Reasoning"

               Wednesday, August 18, 2004
	                ENG 4066
	            11:00 a.m. - noon

Abstract:

I survey an array of topics surrounding automated commonsense
reasoning, which I take to be the problem of how to get by
in a complex world that abounds in the unexpected---something
that humans are quite good at, and computers are not.  Is our
ability an evolutionary hodgepodge of special cases, a holistic
amalgam of countless parts with little or no intelligible
structure?  Or might there be some few key modular features
that provide the "cognitive adequacy" to muddle through in
the face of the unexpected?

I will argue that there is strong evidence for the latter,
and that the key architectural feature is a "metacognitive
loop" that provides a form of real-time self-knowledge and
self-adaptation.  Results using such a mechanism will be
discussed, along with related ideas in philosophy of mind
and language.


Biosketch:  Don Perlis received a PhD in math from NYU (1972) and
in computer science from the University of Rochester (1981).  Since
then he has worked in AI, with emphasis on commonsense reasoning.

He is currently Professor of Computer Science at the University
of Maryland, College Park, where he directs the "ALMECOM" research
group ( Active Logic, MEtacognitive COmputation, and Mind --
http://www.cs.umd.edu/active )