Anthony Cohn

The Herbert A. Simon Prize for Advances in Cognitive Systems recognizes scientists who have made important and sustained contributions to understanding human and machine intelligence through the design, creation, and study of computational artifacts that exhibit high-level cognition.

The fifth recipient of the Simon Prize was announced at ACS-2021, the Ninth Annual Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems (http://www.cogsys.org/conference/2021/), which took place virtually during November, 2021. After considerable discussion, the Foundation's five-person selection committee decided that:

• The recipient of the 2021 Herbert A. Simon Prize for Advances in Cognitive Systems is Anthony Cohn for his research on qualitative representation and reasoning about space and time, cognitive vision and robotics, and visually-grounded language processing.

The awardee received his PhD in 1983 from University of Essex, where he worked with Patrick Hayes, and has been on the academic staff at the University of Leeds since 1990, where he serves as Professor of Automated Reasoning.

Anthony Cohn has been active in AI and cognitive science for over 40 years. His research has focused on central ideas in the cognitive systems movement, especially the symbolic representation of content and its use in qualitative reasoning, as well as the development of computational artifacts that incorporate insights about human cognition. Cohn's most influential work has been the Region Connection Calculus, or RCC, which he introduced in 1992.

Relevant Links

• University of Leeds page
• Google Scholar page

Selected References

• Randell, D. A., Cui, Z., & Cohn, A. G. (1992). A spatial logic based on regions and connection. Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (pp. 165-176). Cambridge, MA.
• Cohn, A. G., Randell, D. A., & Cui, Z. (1995). Taxonomies of logically defined qualitative spatial relations. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 43, 831-846.
• Cohn, A. G., & Varzi, A. C. (2003). Mereotopological connection. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 32, 357-390.
• Cohn, A. G., Li, S., Liu, W., & Renz, J. (2014). Reasoning about topological and cardinal direction relations between 2-dimensional spatial objects. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 51, 493-532.
• Dubba, K. S., Cohn, A. G., Hogg, D. C., Bhatt, M., & Dylla, F. (2015). Learning relational event models from video. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 53, 41-90.