Dr. Michael van Lent

Michael van Lent, Ph.D. is President, CEO, and Chief Scientist at Soar Technology. He is also on the Editorial Board of Computer magazine: The flagship magazine of the IEEE Computer Society.
 
Soar Technology is a leading developer of advanced intelligent agent software and cognitive systems. SoarTech’s state-of-the-art “intelligent agents” provide human-like reasoning in software to automate complex tasks, simplify human-system interaction, or simulate human-like behavior for military and civilian applications such as games, simulation, training, intelligence analysis, and robot command and control.
 
Mike leads research and development of artificial intelligence for training and serious games, transitioning research into engineered solutions. He earned his BA in Computer Science from Williams College, his MS in Computer Science from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2000 with the thesis “Learning Task-Performance Knowledge Through Observation”. Prior to earning his Ph.D., he worked at the Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence (NCARAI) at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.
 
He joined the Institute for Creative Technologies in 2001, where he became the Associate Director for Games Research and a Research Associate Professor in the Computer Science department at USC. He has participated in the design and development of many immersive training applications including Full Spectrum Warrior, Full Spectrum Command, the Joint Fires and Effects Trainer System (JFETS), and ELECT BiLAT. He serves on various editorial boards and edits IEEE Computer’s Entertainment Computing Column.
 
Mike coauthored Human-level AI’s Killer Application: Interactive Computer Games, Intelligent Agents in Computer Games, Learning Hierarchical Performance Knowledge by Observation, Applying Perceptually Driven Cognitive Mapping to Virtual Urban Environments, Developing an Artificial Intelligence Engine, Perceptually Driven Cognitive Mapping of Urban Environments, Building Explainable Artificial Intelligence Systems, Enhancing the Behavioral Fidelity of Synthetic Entities with Human Behavior Models, and Design Recommendations to Support Automated Explanation and Tutoring.