Don Perlis

Professor
Department of Computer Science

with affiliate appointments in
Institute for Advanced Computer Studies
Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science

I work mostly in artificial intelligence: commonsense reasoning; flexible, domain-general, self-adjusting autonomous systems; and philosophical issues surrounding language, mind, consciousness. Much of this work is conducted collaboratively with students and colleagues; the primary current thrust aims to test our ambitious "commonsense-core hypothesis" (see links below). This research is currently supported in part by external grants from NSF, ONR, AFOSR.

Contact infomation

 Mail:  Donald Perlis
University of Maryland
Dept. of Computer Science
A. V. Williams Building
College Park, MD 20742 USA
Phone: 301-405-2685
Fax: 301-405-6707
Web: http://www.cs.umd.edu/~perlis
Email: (my last name) @cs.umd.edu
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Don Perlis

Selected highlights

2008: To BICA and beyond: How biology and anomalies together contribute to flexible cognition. Keynote address, AAAI Fall Symposium on Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures, Washington DC.
2008: There's No ``Me'' in ``Meta'' - or Is There? Keynote address, Workshop on Metareasoning: Thinking about Thinking, AAAI Annual Conference, Chicago.
2005: Logic, self-awareness and self-improvement: the metacognitive loop and the problem of brittleness. (Co-authored with Michael Anderson.) The #1 most-read article from Journal of Logic and Computation for 2005; top 5 for 2006.
2002: Theory and Application of Self-reference. Keynote address, PHILOG Conference, Denmark.
1997: Consciousness as self-function. Invited paper for special issue of Journal of Consciousness Studies.
1992: Memory, mind, and models of self. One-hour invited lecture, Annual Conference, Canadian Society for Computational Studies of Intelligence, Vancouver.
1985: Languages with Self-reference I: Foundations. Listed in D. Bobrow's 1993 compilation of the most frequently-cited papers in AIJ from 1970 to 1991. Central result selected for use in KIF: Knowledge Interchange Format, Interlingua Working Group of the ARPA Knowledge Sharing Effort.