Influence
Schank was a leading pioneer of artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology in the 1970s and 1980s. His innovations in these fields were conceptual dependency theory and case-based reasoning, both of which challenged cognitivist views of memory and reasoning.
In 1969 Schank introduced the conceptual dependency theory for natural language understanding. This model, partly based on the work of Sydney Lamb, was extensively used by Schank's students at Yale University, such as Robert Wilensky, Wendy Lehnert, and Janet Kolodner.
Case-based reasoning (CBR) is based on Schank's model of dynamic memory and was the basis for the earliest CBR systems: Janet Kolodner's CYRUS and Michael Lebowitz's IPP.
Other schools of CBR and closely allied fields emerged in the 1980s, investigating such topics as CBR in legal reasoning, memory-based reasoning (a way of reasoning from examples on massively parallel machines), and combinations of CBR with other reasoning methods. In the 1990s, interest in CBR grew, as evidenced by the establishment of an International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning in 1995, as well as European, German, British, Italian, and other CBR workshops.
CBR technology has produced a number of successful deployed systems, the earliest being Lockheed's CLAVIER, a system for laying out composite parts to be baked in an industrial convection oven. CBR has been used extensively in help desk applications such as the Compaq SMART system and has found a major application area in the health sciences.
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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