My research surrounds advanced autonomy and general theories of cognition. I work on cognitive architectures for intelligent agents, the technologies underlying those architectures, and on applications of intelligent artifacts. I am one of the principle authors of the Icarus architecture, which supplies a framework for constructing agents that pursue complex tasks in dynamic environments. I am interested in research on agent motivation, and in establishing trust between artificial agents and their human users. I work with a variety of tools and technologies that enable intelligent agents, e.g., explanation based learning, reinforcement learning, logical inference, reactive programming, decision theory, and operations research, as well as on a variety of tasks that employ intelligent artifacts, such as transfer learning, problem solving, and human-machine spoken dialogue.

I am the past president of Applied Reactivity, Inc., a company I formed to take my work on value driven agents out of academia and into application. I have been a Senior Researcher at the Stanford University Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), and am currently an affiliate of its Computational Learning Laboratory (CLL).