John Laird received a Bachelor of Science in Communication and Computer Science from the University of Michigan in 1975 and a Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1983. His Doctor of Philosophy thesis advisor was Allen Newell.
Laird is a Professor of the Computer Science and Engineering Division of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of the University of Michigan. He was the director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory there from 1994 to 1999. Laird was a researcher at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the Intelligent Systems Laboratory from 1984 to 1986.
In 1986 he joined the faculty at the University of Michigan.
Laird has continued to do research on architectures of the mind and to develop and evolve the Soar architecture since his time at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a key speaker at the annual Soar workshop and participates in the international Soar Research Group. In 1998 he co-founded Soar Technology, a company that specializes in creating autonomous Artificial Intelligence entities based on Soar.
He currently serves on its Board of Directors. His particular research interests are reinforcement learning, episodic memory, semantic memory, and emotion-inspired processing.
He is a Fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence.
