Roger C. Schank, a scientist who made influential contributions to the field of artificial intelligence and then became an academic, author, and entrepreneur focused on how humans learn, died January 29 in Shelburne, Vt. He was 76 years old.
His wife, Annie Schank, said the cause was heart failure. She added that Dr. Schank, who lived in Quebec, had been ill for more than a year.
dr Schank’s research combined linguistics, cognitive science, and computer science. In a 1995 essay he described the common theme of his diverse projects in science and business as “trying to understand the nature of the human mind” and “building models of the human mind on the computer”.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, Dr. Give ideas on how to symbolize simple concepts—like people and places, objects and events, cause-and-effect relationships—that people describe in words for a computer. His model was called “conceptual dependency theory”.
dr Schank later found ways to stitch together this raw material of knowledge into the equivalent of human memories of past experiences. He called these larger building blocks of knowledge “scripts” and viewed them as ingredients for learning from examples or “case-based thinking”.
“When I was a graduate student in the late 1970s, Roger Schank was required reading,” continued Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard University a memorial page. “He was considered one of the most important researchers and theorists in artificial intelligence and cognitive science.”
But dr Schank’s ideas were introduced in the early days of AI, when computers were big, slow, and expensive. Attempting to program a computer to carry out his ideas proved impractical. And finally, advances in AI came from statistical pattern matching, rather than trying to teach computers to reason like humans do.
In the last decade in particular, the path of statistical pattern matching—driven by vast data stores and lightning-fast computers—has made remarkable strides.
The new celebrity ChatGPT, a huge software program that processes digital text from websites, books, news articles, and Wikipedia entries, is a good example. When someone types in a question or request, ChatGPT’s powerful pattern-matching algorithms can generate poems, speeches, and homework with remarkable, human-like fluency. But an AI program like ChatGPT lacks the semblance of common sense or real-world understanding, so it can also produce bizarre errors, racist and sexist smears, and weird tirades.
These flaws, computer scientists say, could open the door to a revival of the ideas that Dr. Schank advocated years ago. Adding facts about the physical world and structured thinking could overcome the weaknesses of the new programs, called large language models.
“These models can do amazing things, but they need to be controlled,” said Kristian Hammond, an AI researcher at Northwestern University and a former student of Dr. Bar, by phone. “Roger Schank’s work now has the partner technology in large language models to become a reality.”
“I think that will end up being part of his legacy,” said Dr. hammond
Roger Carl Schank was born on March 12, 1946 in Manhattan. His father Maxwell was an administrator at the New York State Liquor Authority. His mother, Margaret (Rosenberg) Schank, ran a jewelry wholesale business.
dr Schank attended public schools in New York and graduated from Stuyvesant High School. He received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Texas.
After serving as an assistant professor at Stanford University, Dr. Schank 1974 Professor of Computer Science and Psychology at Yale University. During his 15 years there, he served as chair of the computer science department and became director of the Yale University Artificial Intelligence Project, mentoring dozens of students who became AI researchers at universities and corporations, including the Georgia Institute of Technology and Google.
dr Schank was a prolific author; Two of his general audience books were selected for the New York Times Book Review’s annual list of “Books Notable.” The Cognitive Computer: On Language, Learning, and Artificial Intelligence, published in 1984 and co-written with Peter G. Childers described by Susan Chace in her Times review as a “clear, funny, and clever” portrayal of the problems associated with “trying to get computers to mimic human thinking.” And the psychologist Robert J. Sternberg entitled “Tell Me a Story: A New Look at Real and Artificial Memory” (1990) “an impressive book” which shows “that we can better understand intelligence by examining the behavior of people in their everyday lives than by giving them trivial test tasks.”
In addition to his wife, Dr. Schank his daughter Hana Schank; his son Joshua Schank; and four grandchildren. His first marriage to Diane (Levine) Schank ended in divorce in 1998.
dr Outspoken and boisterous, Schank was viewed in AI circles as an unruly eccentric. But he was also engaging, articulate, and a very effective seller of his ideas.
He persuaded Anderson Consulting, and later other corporate sponsors, to donate millions to the Institute for Learning Sciences at Northwestern, which he founded in 1989. The Institute was a learning research center that developed educational and training software used by corporations, museums, and the United States Army.
dr Schank viewed his turn to learning and educational software as a practical extension of his research in AI and cognition. “The most important thing to understand about the mind,” he wrote in 1995, “is that it is a learning device.”
His bigger vision, said Ray Bareiss, a computer scientist who worked with Dr. Schank had worked together, be it to reform education. dr Schank believed that traditional education, with its lectures, memorization of facts and tests, was broken. People learn best, he emphasized, when they acquire knowledge to complete a desired task or achieve a goal.
The learning-by-doing formula was an approach that Dr. Schank at some of the learning startups he founded and at Carnegie Mellon’s Silicon Valley campus in Mountain View, California, where he was chief education officer from 2001-2004 Software development, e-commerce and other fields, mainly through working at companies in Silicon Valley.
dr Schank looked for opportunities to work with schools, non-profit organizations, and businesses where he could advance his vision of non-traditional education. In 2005, he joined Trump University as Chief Learning Officer. He left in 2007 after it became clear that the non-profit school was no longer interested in his reform ideas, said Dr. Bareiss, who was not involved in this project.
Trump University closed in 2011 due to court cases, investigations, and student complaints.
dr Schank later faced controversy for his connection to Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier and convicted sex trafficker. Mr. Epstein hosted conferences for scientists on his private island off St. Thomas. dr Schank attended one of those gatherings in 2002, and his name appeared among those of dozens of prominent people who had had some sort of contact with Mr. Epstein.
also dr Schank had a home in Palm Beach, Fla., for years, as did Mr. Epstein, whom he knew personally and initially defended after his initial conviction in 2008.
His goal of educational alternatives was pursued by Dr. Schank until shortly before his death. He was chairman of Socratic Arts, a company he founded whose senior vice president, Dr. Bareiss is and has developed online courses that are used by many companies to train employees. It also has a popular cybersecurity offering funded by the Department of Defense.
But dr Schank’s ideas for educational reform remain outside the mainstream. The educational institution, said Dr. Bareiss, opposes turning away from the lecture and examination model.
“The vision of fundamentally changing public education was not realized,” he said. “But it’s worth a try.”
