Don Perlis

Professor Emeritus

NOTE: I *RETIRED* IN SUMMER 2021

Department of Computer Science

with affiliate appointments in
-Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS)
-Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science (NACS)

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 largely supported by external grants, such as from NSF, ONR, ARO, and AFOSR.

• Laboratory page
• Commonsense-core hypothesis
• Publications
• Current and former students and postdocs

Contact infomation

Mail:	Donald Perlis University of Maryland Dept. of Computer Science A. V. Williams Building 8223 Paint Branch Drive College Park, MD 20742-3255 USA
Phone:	301-405-2685
Fax:	301-405-6707
Web:	http://www.cs.umd.edu/~perlis
Email:	(my last name) @cs.umd.edu
Personal

Selected highlights

2017:	The Internal Reasoning of Robots. (Coauthored with Justin Brody, Sarit Kraus, Michael Miller.) Thirteenth International Symposium on Commonsense Reasoning (Commonsense-2017), London.
2016:	Five Dimensions of Reasoning in the Wild. First-place winner, Blue Sky Award, AAAI-2016, Phoenix AZ
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.
1990:	Reasoning Situated in Time I: Basic Concepts. (Coauthored with Jennifer Elgot-Drapkin.) J. Experimental and Theoretical AI.
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.