Rare disease represents one of the most significant issues facing the medical community and health care providers worldwide, yet the majority of these disorders never emerge from their obscurity, drawing little attention from the medical community or the pharmaceutical industry. The challenge therefore is how best to mobilize rare disease stakeholders to enhance basic, translational and clinica...

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents can benefit from adaptive exploration/exploitation behavior, especially in dynamic environments. We focus on regulating this exploration/exploitation behavior by controlling the action-selection mechanism of RL. Inspired by psychological studies which show that affect influences human decision making, we use artificial affect to influence an agent’s action-sel...

In this paper, I describe how a cognitive model was used as a simulated student to help design lessons for training circuit board assemblers. The model was built in the Soar cognitive architecture, and was initially endowed with only an ability to learn instructions and prerequisite knowledge for the task. Five lessons, and a total of 81 instructions for teaching expert assembly were developed ...

Architectures that implement the Common Model of Cognition - Soar, ACT-R, and Sigma have a prominent place in research on cognitive modeling as well designing complex intelligent agents. In this paper, we explore how computational models analogical processing can be brought into these architectures to enable concept acquisition from examples obtained interactively. We propose new memory for Soa...

Finding information within websites is becoming an increasing challenge as the size and the complexity of websites soar. One possible solution is to adapt the view of the site to the task in hand. Although such a procedure is technically feasible, the effectiveness of such designs is yet to be tested. Assuming user scenarios that involve searches by browsing rather than structured queries, we b...

The tutorial provides participants with an understanding of the details of Soar so that they can create simple Soar programs. This is a full-day tutorial, with an emphasis in the morning on understanding the syntax and structure of the architecture (the memories and processes), and an emphasis in the afternoon on agent development. In the morning, participants will learn to run, modify, and deb...

Humans use visual imagery for a variety of purposes including reasoning about visual properties and spatial relationships, anticipating future events, recalling past experiences, and memorizing concepts and facts. Cognitive architectures have traditionally ignored visual imagery, but we have started to explore this phenomenon in the context of Soar. Soar provides the underlying control, memory,...