Nick CassimatisAssociate Professor
Department of Cognitive Science
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Research | Publications | Background
My research aims to understand human-level intelligence and create it in computers.
Cassimatis, N. L., & Bignoli, P. (in press). Testing Common Sense Reasoning Abilities. Journal of Theoretical and Experimental Artificial Intelligence.
Kurup, U, Bignoli, P., Scally, J. R., & Cassimatis, N. L. (in press). An Architectural Framework for Complex Cognition. Journal of Cognitive Systems Research.
Cassimatis, N., Bignoli, P., Bugajska, M., Dugas, S., Kurup, U., Murugesan, A., & Bello, P. (2010). An Architecture for Adaptive Algorithmic Hybrids. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B, 4(3), 903 - 914.
Kurup, U., & Cassimatis, N. L. (2010). Integrating Constraint Satisfaction and Spatial Reasoning. In Proceedings of the AAAI-10 Conference, Atlanta, GA, pp. 1-6.
Kurup, U., & Cassimatis, N. L. (2010). Spatial Constraint Satisfaction Using SAT. In Proceedings of the Spatial Cognition, Portland, Oregon, pp. 1-16.
Kurup, U., & Cassimatis, N. L. (2010). Quantitative Spatial Reasoning for General Intelligence. In Proceedings of the AGI-10 Conference, Lugano, Switzerland, pp. 1-6.
Bignoli, P., & Cassimatis, N. L. (2010). Efficient Constraint-Satisfaction in Domains with Time. In Proceedings of the AGI-10 Conference, Lugano, Switzerland, pp. 1-6.
Pless, R., Dixon, D., Jacobs, N., Baker, P., Cassimatis, N. L., Brock, D. P., Hartley, R., & Perzanowski, P (2010). Persistence and Tracking: Putting Vehicles and Trajectories in Context. In Proceedings of the Applied Imagery Pattern Recognition Workshop, Washington, DC, pp. 1-8.
Uchida, H. & Cassimatis, N. L. (2010). A singular NP lattice without explicit quantification. In Proceedings of 18th Annual Meeting of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology, Bochum, Germany, pp. 187 -190.Â
Cassimatis, N. L. (2009). Flexible Inference with Structured Knowledge through Reasoned Unification. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 24(4), 59-67.
Cassimatis, N. L., Murugesan, A., & Bignoli, P. G. (2009). Reasoning as Simulation. Cognitive Processing, 10(4). 343-353.
Cassimatis, N. L., Murugesan, A., & Bignoli, P. (2009). Inference with Relational Theories over Infinite Domains. In Proceedings of the FLAIRS-09 Conference, Florida, USA, pp. 21-26.
Murugesan, A., Cassimatis, N. L., & Bignoli, P. (2009). Parsing PCFG within a General Probabilistic Inference Framework. In Proceedings of the Artificial General Intelligence Conference (AGI-09), Arlington, Virginia, pp. 1-6.
Cassimatis, N. L., Bello, P., & Langley, P. (2008). Ability, Parsimony and Breadth in Models of Higher-Order Cognition. Cognitive Science, 33(8), 1304 -1322.
Cassimatis, N. L., Murugesan, A., & Bugajska, M. (2008). A Cognitive Substrate for Natural Language Understadning. In P. Wang, B. Goertzel & S. Franklin (Eds.), Artificial General Intelligence 2008 (pp. 99-106). Washington, DC: IOS Press.
Beal, J., Bello, P., Cassimatis, N. L., Coen, M., Cohen, P., Davis, A., et al. (2008). AAAI 2008 Fall Symposia Reports. AI Magazine, 30(2), 106-111.
Cassimatis, N. L. (2008). Resolving Ambiguous, Implicit and Non-Literal References by Jointly Reasoning over Linguistic and Non-Linguistic Knowledge. In Proceedings of the LONDIAL 2008, University of London, England.
Cassimatis, N. L., Murugesan, A., & Bugajska, M. (2008). A Cognitive Substrate for Natural Language Understanding. In Proceedings of the AGI-08 Conference, Memphis, Tennessee, USA, pp. 99-106.
Cassimatis, N. L. (2007). Adaptive Algorithmic Hybrids for Human-Level Artificial Intelligence. In B. Goertzel & P. Wang (Ed.), Advances in Artificial General Intelligence (pp. 94-110). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: IOS Press.
Cassimatis, N. L. (2007). Reasoning as Cognitive Self-Regulation. In W. Gray (Ed.), Integrated Models of Cognitive Systems. (pp. 76-85). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Bello, P., Bignoli, P., & Cassimatis, N. L. (2007). Attention and Association Explain the Emergence of Reasoning About False Belief in Young Children. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Cognitive Modeling, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, pp. 169-174.
Bello, P., & Cassimatis, N. L. (2007). Some Computational Desiderata for Recognizing and Reasoning About the Intentions of Others. In Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Intentions in Intelligent Systems, Stanford, California, pp. 1-6.
Cassimatis, N. L., & Bello, P. (2007). Cognitive Architecture as Revolutionary Science. In Proceedings of the AAAI Workshop on Evaluating Architectures for Intelligence, Vancouver, British Columbia, pp. 16-18.
Cassimatis, N. L., Bugajska, M. D., Dugas, S., Murugesan, A., & Bello, P. (2007). An Architecture for Adaptive Algorithmic Hybrids. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, pp. 1520-1526.
Cassimatis, N. L. (2006). Cognitive Substrate for Human-Level Intelligence. AI Magazine 27(2), 45-56.
Trafton, G., Schultz, A., Cassimatis, N. L., Hiatt, L., Perzanowski, D., Brock, D., et al. (2006). Communicating and Collaborating with Robotic Agents. In R. Sun (Ed.), Cognition and Multi-Agent Interaction (pp. 252-278). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Cassimatis, N. L., E.K. Mueller, & Winston, P. H. (2006). Achieving human-level intelligence through integrated systems and research: introduction to this special issue. AI Magazine, 27(2), 12-14.
Bello, P., & Cassimatis, N. L. (2006). Developmental Accounts of Theory-of-Mind Acquisition:Â Achieving Clarity via Computational Cognitive Modeling. In Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Vancouver, Canada, pp. 1014-1019.
Bello, P., & Cassimatis, N. L. (2006). Understanding other Minds: A Cognitive Modeling Approach. . In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Cognitive Modeling, Trieste, Italy.
Bugajska, M., & Cassimatis, N. L. (2006). Beyond Association: Social Cognition in Word Learning. In Proceedings of the The Fifth International Conference on Development and Learning, Bloomington, IN, USA.
Cassimatis, N. L. (2006). Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence Have the Same Problem. In Proceedings of the 2006 AAAI Spring Symposium on Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Cognitive Science Principles Meet AI-Hard Problems, Standford University, pp. 27-32.
Murugesan, A., & Cassimatis, N. L. (2006). A Model of Syntactic Parsing Based on Domain-General Cognitive Mechanisms. In Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Vancover, Canada, pp. 1850-1855.
Schultz, A., Trafton, G., Perzanowski, D., Brock, D., Bugajska, M., Adams, W., & Cassimatis, N. (2006). Children and Robots Learning to Play Hide and Seek
In Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, pp. 242-249.
Trafton, J. G., Schultz, A. C., Perzanowski, D., Bugajska, M. D., Adams, M., Cassimatis, N. L., & Brock, D. P. (2006). Children and Robots Learning to Play Hide and Seek. In Proceedings of the IJCAI Workshop on Cognitive Modeling of Agents and Multi-Agent Interactions, pp. 242 - 249.
Sofge, D., M. Bugajska, J.G. Trafton, D. Perzanowski, S. Thomas, M. Skubic, S. Blisard, Cassimatis, N. L., D. Brock, W. Adams, and A. Schultz, P. Vadakkepat (Ed.). (2005). Collaborating with Humanoid Robots in Space. International Journal of Humanoid Robotics, 2(2), 181-201.
Trafton, J. G., Cassimatis, N. L., Bugajska, M., Brock, D., Mintz, F., & Schultz, A. (2005). Enabling effective human-robot interaction using perspective-taking in robots. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, 35(4), 460-470.
Cassimatis, N. L., Luke, S., Levy, S. D., Gayler, R., Kanerva, P., Eliasmith, C., et al. (2005). Reports on the 2004 AAAI Fall Symposia. AI Magazine, 26(1), 98-102.
Cassimatis, N. L. (2005). Integrating Cognitive Models Based on Different Computational Methods. In Proceedings of the The Twenty-Seventh Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Stresa, Italy, pp. 402-407.
Cassimatis, N. L. (2005). Integrated Simulations of Human Cognition and Behavior. In Proceedings of the SPIE Defense and Security Conference (SPIE), Orlando, FL, pp. 137-144.
Cassimatis, N. L., Trafton, J., Bugajska, M., & Schultz, A. (2004). Integrating Cognition, Perception and Action through Mental Simulation in Robots. Journal of Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 49(1-2), 13-23.
Cassimatis, N. L. (2004). Grammatical Processing Using the Mechanisms of Physical Inferences. In Proceedings of the Twentieth-Sixth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Chicago, IL, pp. 192-197.
Perzanowski, D., Brock, D., Bugajska, M., Adams, W., Thomas, S., Sofge, D., Skubic, M., Blisard, S., Cassimatis, N. L., Trafton, J. G., & Schultz, A. C. (2004). Toward Multimodal Human-Robot Cooperation and Collaboration. In Proceedings of the The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics First Intelligent System Technical Conference, Chicago, IL, pp. 20-21.
Sofge, D., Perzanowski, D., Bugajska, M., Skubic, M., Trafton, J. G., Cassimatis, N. L., Adams, W., Brock, D., & Schultz, A. C. (2004). Collaborating with a Dynamically Autonomous Cognitive Robot. In Proceedings of the 1st IFAC Symposium on Telematics Applications in Automation and Robotics, Helsinki University of Technology Espoo, Finland.
Sofge, D., Perzanowski, D., Skubic, M., Bugajska, M., Trafton, J. G., Cassimatis, N. L., Brock, D., Adams, W., & Schultz, A. (2004). Cognitive Tools for Humanoid Robots in Space. In Proceedings of the 16th IFAC Symposium on Automatic Control in Aerospace, Saint-Petersburg, Russia, pp. 351-357.
Sofge, D., Trafton, J. G., Cassimatis, N. L., Perzanowski, D., Bugajska, M., Adams, W., & Schultz, A. C. (2004). Human-Robot Collaboration and Cognition with an Autonomous Mobile Robot. In Proceedings of the 8th Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS-8), Amsterdam, The Netherlands, pp. 80-87.
Trafton, J. G., Schultz, A. C., Cassimatis, N. L., Hiatt, L., Perzanowski, D., Brock, D. P., Bugajska, M., & Adams, W. (2004). Using Similar Representations to Improve Human-Robot Interaction. In Proceedings of the Agents and Architectures.
Cassimatis, N. L. (2003). A Framework for Answering Queries using Multiple Representation and Inference Techniques. In Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Knowledge Representation meets Databases, Hamberg, Germany, pp. 87-99.
Cassimatis, N. L., & Trafton, J. G. (2003). Modeling uncertain reasoning with stochastic simulation in ACT-R. In Proceedings of the 10th Annual ACT-R Workshop, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, p. 41.
Sofge, D., Perzanowski, D., Skubic, M., Cassimatis, N. L., Trafton, J. G., Brock, D., Bugajska, M., Adams, W., & Schultz, A. (2003). Achieving Collaborative Interaction with a Humanoid Robot. In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Computational Intelligence, Robotics and Autonomous Systems (CIRAS), Singapore.
Trafton, J., Schultz, A., Adams, W., Cassimatis, N. (2003). Playing hide and seek: How much spatial cognition is needed?  In Proceedings of the 2003 International Conference on Cognitive Modeling.Bamberg, Germany, p. 308.
Trafton, J., Schultz, A., Perzanowski, D., Adams, B., Bugajska, M., Cassimatis, N. L., & Brock, D. (2003). Learning to Play Hide and Seek. In Proceedings of the IJCAI Workshop on Cognitive Modeling of Agents and Multi-Agent Interactions, Acapulco, Mexico. pp. 242-249.
Cassimatis, N. L., Trafton, G., Schultz, A., Bugajska, M., & Adams, W. (2002). A Task Domain for Combining and Evaluating Robotics and Cognitive Modeling Techniques. In Proceedings of the Measuring the Performance and Intelligence of Systems: 2002 PerMIS Workshop, NIST, Gaithersburg, MD.
Solomon, G. E. A., & Cassimatis, N. L. (1999). On facts and conceptual systems: Young children's integration of their understanding of germs and contagion. Developmental Psychology, 35, 113-126.
I received a bachelor's degree in mathematics form MIT and a master's degree in psychology from Stanford. I studied artificial intelligence in Marvin Minsky's group at the MIT Media Laboratory, where I received my Ph.D. I was then an NRC postdoctoral associate at the Naval Research Laboratory's AI Center for two years. I have been on the faculty of the Cognitive Science Department at Rensselaer since then.