Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

After receiving a PhD in philosophy from the City University of New York, I spent several years in industry working on the Cyc artificial intelligence project before moving to the data firm Dun & Bradstreet as their principal ontologist. After postdoctoral positions at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation at the University of Amsterdam, the University of St.

Yingrui Yang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cognitive Science, with a joint appointment in the Lally School of Management & Technology.  Dr. Yang received his doctorate in Experimental Psychology from New York University in 1995.  Since 1974, he also studied or worked at Beijing Normal University, Peking University, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (Beijing), the University of Tennessee (Knoxville), New York University, Princeton University, Educational Testing Service, the United States Air Force Information Laboratory, and Tsinghua University. Dr.

Prof. Tomek Strzalkowski research interests span a wide spectrum of human language technology including computational linguistics and sociolinguistics, socio-behavioral computing, interactive information retrieval, question-answering, human-computer dialogue, serious games, social media analytics, formal semantics, and reversible grammars. He has directed research sponsored by IARPA, DARPA, ARL, AFRL, NSF, the European Commission, NSERC, as well as a number of industry-funded projects. He was involved in IBM’s Jeopardy! Challenge in advanced question answering. Dr.

Sergei Nirenburg has worked in the areas of cognitive science, artificial intelligence and natural language processing (NLP) for over 40 years, leading R&D teams of up to 80. His professional interests include developing computational models of human cognitive capabilities and implementing them in hybrid-engine models of societies of human and computer agents; continued development of the theory of ontological semantics; and acquisition and management of knowledge about the world and about language.

Mei Si is primarily interested in is artificial intelligence and its application in virtual and mixed realities. In particular, her research concentrates on computer-aided interactive narratives, embodied conversational agents and pervasive user interface, elements that make virtual environments more engaging and effective. Si has been using her research to develop virtual environments and intelligent conversational agents for serious games.

Marjorie McShane develops cognitive models of intelligent agents that can collaborate with people in task-oriented, dialog applications.

John Milanese explores philosophical questions about science and technology, especially those concerning the role that ethical and political values play in shaping scientific research and technological progress. In all of his classes, students have the opportunity to work closely with him and their peers on projects of their own creation that are most relevant to their interests. He currently works with students in the following classes: Minds and Machines, Critical Thinking, Ethics, Philosophy of Science, and Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. 

James Hendler is the Acting Department Head of the Cognitive Science Department, the Tetherless World Professor of Computer, Web and Cognitive Sciences at RPI and is also director of the RPI-IBM Artificial Intelligence Research Collaboration. Hendler is a data scientist with specific interests in open government and scientific data, data science for healthcare, AI and machine learning, semantic data integration and the use of data in government.

Dr. Holly A. Traver received her B.A. and Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from the University at Albany, State University of New York. While she has published and presented in various journals and at conferences, her passion lies in interacting with and educating the bright and talented students at Rensselaer. In addition, she has served as a consultant for the New York State Police, Academy of Certified Archivists, and Snowslip Equine Center. In 2010, Dr.