Roger C. Schank, 76, theorist of artificial intelligence, dies

Roger C. Schank, a scientist who made influential contributions to the field of artificial intelligence and then, as an academic, author and entrepreneur, focused on how people learn, died Jan. 29 in Shelburne, Vermont. He was 76.

His wife, Annie, said the cause was heart failure. She said Schank, who lived in Quebec, had been in failing health for more than a year.

Schank's research combined linguistics, cognitive science and computing. In a 1995 essay, he described the common theme of his varied projects in academics 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 '70s, Schank — who served as an assistant professor at Stanford — developed ideas for how to represent in symbols for a computer simple concepts — such as people and places, objects and events, cause-and-effect relationships — that humans describe with words. His model was called “conceptual dependency theory.”

Schank later came up with ways to assemble this raw material of knowledge into the equivalent of human memories of past experience. He called these larger building blocks of knowledge “scripts” and regarded them as ingredients for learning from examples, or “case-based reasoning.”

“When I was a graduate student in the late 1970s, Roger Schank was required reading,” Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard University, wrote on a memorial website. “He was regarded as one of the major researchers and theoreticians in artificial intelligence and cognitive science.”

But Schank's ideas were introduced in the early days of AI, when computers were big, slow and expensive. Trying to program a computer to execute his ideas proved impractical. And eventually, progress in AI came from statistical pattern-matching instead of from seeking to teach computers to reason as people do.

Especially over the past decade, the statistical pattern-matching path — fueled by vast stores of data and lightning-fast computers — has delivered striking gains.

The newly famous ChatGPT, a giant software program that digests 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 patternmatching algorithms can generate poems, speeches and homework papers with remarkable, human-seeming fluency. But an AI program such as ChatGPT has no semblance of common sense or real-world understanding, so it can also produce bizarre mistakes, racist and sexist screeds and weird rants.

Those shortcomings, computer scientists say, could open the door to a revival of the ideas that Schank advocated years ago. Adding facts about the physical world and structured reasoning, they say, could overcome the weaknesses of the new programs, which are called large language models.

“These models can do amazing things, but they need to be steered,” Kristian Hammond, an AI researcher at Northwestern University and a former student of Schank's, said by phone. “Roger Schank's work now has the partner technology, in large language models, to become real.”

“I think that's going to end up being part of his legacy,” Hammond said.

Roger Carl Schank was born March 12, 1946, in the New York City borough of Manhattan. His father, Maxwell, was an administrator at the New York State Liquor Authority. His mother, Margaret (Rosenberg) Schank, ran a wholesale decorative-bead business.

Schank attended public schools in New York and graduated from Stuyvesant High School. He received an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University and a doctorate in linguistics from the University of Texas.

After a stint as an assistant professor at Stanford University, Schank became a professor of computer science and psychology at Yale University in 1974. In his 15 years there, he served as chair of the computer science department, became the director of the Yale Artificial Intelligence Project and mentored dozens of students who became AI researchers at universities and companies, including the Georgia Institute of Technology and Google.

Schank was a prolific author; two of his books for general audiences were selected for The New York Times Book Review's annual list of “notable books.” “The Cognitive Computer: On Language, Learning, and Artificial Intelligence,” published in 1984 and written with Peter G. Childers, was described by Susan Chace in her Times review as a “clear, funny and smart” account of the problems involved in “trying to get computers to mimic human reasoning.” And the psychologist Robert J. Sternberg called “Tell Me a Story: A New Look at Real and Artificial Memory” (1990) “an impressive book” that shows “we can understand intelligence better by examining people's behavior in their everyday lives than by giving them trivial test problems.”

In addition to his wife, Schank is survived by his daughter, Hana; his son, Joshua; and four grandchildren. His first marriage, to Diane (Levine) Schank, ended in divorce in 1998.

Outspoken and blustery, Schank was viewed as an ornery eccentric in AI circles. But he was also engaging, articulate and a very effective salesperson for his ideas.

He persuaded Anderson Consulting and, later, other corporate sponsors to provide millions for the Institute for Learning Sciences at Northwestern, which he founded in 1989. The institute was a center for learning research that developed education and training software used by companies, museums and the Army.

Schank viewed his turn to learning and education 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's a learning device.”

His larger vision, said Ray Bareiss, a computer scientist who worked with Schank for years, was to reform education. Schank believed that traditional education — with its lectures, memorization of facts and tests — was broken. People learned best, he insisted, when they acquired knowledge to complete a desired task or accomplish a goal.

Schank kept pursuing his goal of education alternatives until shortly before he died. He was chair of Socratic Arts, a company he founded — and of which Bareiss is a senior vice president — that has developed learn-by-doing online courses used by many companies for worker training. It also has a popular cybersecurity offering, funded by the Department of Defense.