Stan Franklin (born August 14, 1931) is an American scientist and W. Harry Feinstone Interdisciplinary Research Professor at the University of Memphis, TN and co-director of the Institute of Intelligent Systems.[1] He is the author of Artificial Minds (MIT Press, 1995)[2] and mental father of IDA and its successor LIDA, both computational implementations of Global Workspace Theory. He is founder of the Cognitive Computing Research Group at the University of Memphis.
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Stan was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1931. His graduate degrees are from UCLA, his undergraduate degree from the University of Memphis.
He has lived in Cherry Point, North Carolina, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Los Angeles, California, and Kanpur, India, and has been on the faculty of the University of Florida, Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur,Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Memphis.
A mathematician turned computer scientist turning cognitive scientist, Franklin's research is motivated by wanting to know how minds work—human minds, animal minds and, particularly, artificial minds.
For some years he’s worked on “conscious” software agents, that is, autonomous agents modeling the global workspace theory of consciousness. These agents computationally model human and animal cognition, and provide testable hypotheses for cognitive scientists and neuroscientists. This endeavor, funded by the US Navy, has been the subject of some sixty papers in scientific journals and conference proceedings.
He has authored or co-authored numerous academic papers as well as a book entitled Artificial Minds published by MIT Press, which was a primary selection of the Library of Science book club, and has been translated into Japanese and Portuguese.