Nick Cassimatis Assistant Professor Department of Cognitive Science Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 110 8th St. Troy, NY 12180 cassin at rpi dot edu Research | Publications | Background

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Research

My research aims to understand and create human-level intelligence.  Two fundamental principles guide this work.  First, there is a cognitive substrate of multiple inference and representation abilities that can handle reasoning in most or all domains and, second, that the key to implementing this substrate is to develop methods for more flexibly and deeply integrating these reasoning and inference techniques.  Much of this work occurs in the Human-Level-Intelligence Laboratory.

Publications

Reasoning and Inference

• N.L. Cassimatis, M. Bugajska, S. Dugas, A. Murugesan, P. Bello (2007).  An Architecture for Adaptive Algorithmic Hybrids.  In Proceedings of AAAI-07. 
• N.L. Cassimatis (2007).  Reasoning as Cognitive Self-Regulation.  In Integrated Models of Cognitive Systems.  Oxford University Press.  Ed. W. Gray.
• N.L. Cassimatis (2007).  Adaptive Algorithmic Hybrids for Human-Level Artificial Intelligence.  Advances in Artificial General Intelligence.  IOS Press.  Eds.  B. Goertzel and P. Wang.

Human-Level Intelligence

• N.L. Cassimatis (2006).  A Cognitive Substrate for Human-Level Intelligence.  AI Magazine. Volume 27 Number 2.
• N.L. Cassimatis, E.K. Mueller, P.H. Winston (2006). Editors, Special Issue of AI Magazine on Achieving Human-Level Intelligence through Integrated Systems and Research. AI Magazine. Volume 27 Number 2.
• N.L. Cassimatis (2006). Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence Have the Same Problem.  Proceedings of the 2006 AAAI Spring Symposium on Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Cognitive Science Principles Meet AI-Hard Problems.  Eds. C. Lebiere & R. Wray. 
• N.L. Cassimatis, G. Trafton, A. Schultz, M. Bugajska, W. Adams (2002). A Task Domain for Combining and Evaluating Robotics and Cognitive Modeling Techniques. In Measuring the Performance and Intelligence of Systems: Proceedings of the 2002 PerMIS Workshop.

Cognitive Architecture

• N.L. Cassimatis (2005).  Integrating Cognitive Models Based on Different Computational Methods. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
• N. L. Cassimatis (2005).  Integrated Simulations of Human Cognition and Behavior.   Proceedings of the SPIE Defense and Security.
• N. L. Cassimatis (2002). Polyscheme: A Cognitive Architecture for Integrating Multiple Representation and Inference Schemes. Doctoral Dissertation, Media Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.

Language

• A. Murugesan, N.L. Cassimatis (2006). A Model of Syntactic Parsing Based on Domain-General Cognitive Mechanisms. In Proceedings of 28th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
• N. L. Cassimatis (2004). Grammatical Processing Using the Mechanisms of Physical Inferences.  In Proceedings of the Twentieth-Sixth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
• M. Bugajska, N.L. Cassimatis (2006). Beyond Association: Social Cognition in Word Learning.  In Proceedings of the International Conference on Development and Learning.

Social Cognition

 

• P. Bello, P. Bignoli, N.L. Cassimatis (2007).  Attention and Association Explain the Emergence of Reasoning About False Belief in Young Children.  In Proceedings of the 8^th International Conference on Cognitive Modeling.
• P. Bello, N. L. Cassimatis (2007).  Some Computational Desiderata for Recognizing and Reasoning About the Intentions of Others.  In Proceedings of AAAI Spring Symposium.  Technical Report SS-07-03.  pp. 1-6.  Ed. George Ferguson.
• P. Bello, N.L. Cassimatis (2006). Developmental Accounts of Theory-of-Mind Acquisition:  Achieving Clarity via Computational Cognitive Modeling.  In Proceedings of 28th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
• P. Bello & N.L. Cassimatis (2006).  Understanding other Minds: A Cognitive Modeling Approach.  In Proceedings of the 7^th International Conference on Cognitive Modeling.

Robotics

• G. Trafton, A. Schultz, N. Cassimatis, L. Hiatt, D. Perzanowski, D. Brock, M. Bugajska, W. Adams  (2006)  Communicating and Collaborating with Robotic Agents.  In Cognition and Multi-Agent Interaction, edited by Ron Sun.
• A. Schultz, G. Trafton, D. Perzanowski, D. Brock,M. Bugajska, W. Adams, N. Cassimatis (2006).   Children and robots learning to play hide and seek. In Proceedings of  the 2006 Conference on Human-Robot Interaction.
• J. G.. Trafton, N.L. Cassimatis, M. Bugajska, D. Brock, F. Mintz, A. Schultz (2005).  Enabling effective human-robot interaction using perspective-taking in robots.  IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, pp. 460-470.  Volume 25.  Issue 4.
• Sofge, D., M. Bugajska, J.G. Trafton, D. Perzanowski, S. Thomas, M. Skubic, S. Blisard, N. Cassimatis, D. Brock, W. Adams, and A. Schultz  (2005) "Collaborating with Humanoid Robots in Space," In International Journal of Humanoid Robotics, P. Vadakkepat (Ed.), Volume 2, Number 2, World Scientific Publishing, pp. 181-201, June 2005.
• N. L. Cassimatis, J. Trafton, M. Bugajska, A. Schultz (2004). Integrating Cognition, Perception and Action through Mental Simulation in Robots. Journal of Robotics and Autonomous Systems.  Volume 49, Issues 1-2, 30 November 2004, Pages 13-23.
• J. G. Trafton, Alan C. Schultz, N, L. Cassimatis, L. Hiatt, D. Perzanowski, D. P. Brock, M. Bugajska, and W Adams, (2004). "Using Similar Representations to Improve Human-Robot Interaction,” Agents and Architectures, Erlbaum, 2004.
• Trafton, J. Gregory, Alan C. Schultz, Dennis Perzanowski, Magdalena D. Bugajska, William Adams, Nicholas L. Cassimatis, and Derek P. Brock, "Children and Robots Learning to Play Hide and Seek," Journal of Cognitive Systems Research, Erlbaum, 2004.
• D. Sofge, D. Perzanowski, M. Bugajska, M. Skubic, J. G. Trafton, N. Cassimatis, W. Adams, D. Brock, A. C. Schultz, (2004). “Collaborating with a Dynamically Autonomous Cognitive Robot,” In Proceedings of 1st IFAC Symposium on Telematics Applications in Automation and Robotics, June 2004.
• D. Sofge, J. G. Trafton, N. Cassimatis, D. Perzanowski, M. Bugajska, W. Adams, and A. C. Schultz Sofge,  “Human-Robot Collaboration and Cognition with an Autonomous Mobile Robot,” In Proceedings of the 8th Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS-8), Frans Groen, Nancy Amato, Andrea Bonarini, Eiichi Yoshida, Ben Kröse, Eds., pp. 80-87, IOS Press, March 2004.
• D. Sofge, D. Perzanowski,  M. Skubic, M. Bugajska, J. G. Trafton, N. Cassimatis, D. Brock, W. Adams, and A. Schultz, “Cognitive Tools for Humanoid Robots in Space,”  In Proceedings of the 16th IFAC Symposium on Automatic Control in Aerospace, Elsevier Science Ltd, Oxford, UK, 2004.
• D. Perzanowski, D. Brock, M. Bugajska, W. Adams, S. Thomas, D. Sofge, M. Skubic, S. Blisard, N. Cassimatis, J. G. Trafton, and A. C. Schultz, “Toward Multimodal Human-Robot Cooperation and Collaboration,” Proceedings of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics First Intelligent System Technical Conference, Chicago, IL, 2004.
• 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), Dec. 2003.

Miscellaneous

• N. L. Cassimatis, S. Luke, S. D. Levy, R. Gayler, P. Kanerva, C. Eliasmith, T. Bickmore, A. C. Schultz, R. Davis, J. Landay, R. Miller, E. Saund, T. Stahovich, M. Littman, S. Singh, S. Argamon, S. Dubnov (2005).  Reports on the 2004 AAAI Fall Symposia.  AI Magazine.  Volume 26. Issue 1.
• N. L. Cassimatis (2003). A Framework for Answering Queries using Multiple Representation and Inference Techniques. In Proceedings of the 10th International  Workshop on Knowledge Representation meets Databases.
• J. Trafton, A. Schultz, D. Perzanowski, B. Adams, M. Bugajska , N. L. Cassimatis, D. Brock (2003). Learning to Play Hide and Seek. In Proceedings of Workshop on Cognitive Modeling of Agents and Multi-Agent Interactions. IJCAI, 2003. 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.
• 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.

Background

I received a bachelor's degree in mathematics form MIT and a master's degree in psychology from Stanford.  I studied artificial intelligence under Marvin Minsky at the MIT Media Laboratory where I received my Ph.D. in 2002.  I was an NRC postdoctoral associate at the Naval Research Laboratory's AI Center between 2002 and 2004.  I have been an Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer since then.