People

John Licato

J. Licato

Assistant Professor

ENB 301D | 813-974-6212

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Biography

Dr. John Licato is an assistant professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department of the University of South Florida (USF), and the founder/director of the Advancing Machine and Human Reasoning (AMHR) Lab. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in May 2015, working under Professor Selmer Bringsjord and specializing in the computational modeling of analogical reasoning.

In August 2015, Dr. Licato started as an assistant professor of Computer Science at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW) and founding director of the Analogical Constructivism and Reasoning Lab (ACoRL). Later that year, he was awarded the 2015 AFOSR Young Investigator's Program award. In 2017, he moved to the USF CSE Department and established the AMHR lab.

Research Interests

Dr. Licato is an artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) researcher primarily interested in human-level reasoning; particularly, the kind of reasoning that we normally refer to as cognitive. This includes the following topics: Computational modeling of cognitive reasoning; natural language processing; cognitive science and robotics; computational cognitive architectures; automated theorem provers; artificially intelligent reasoners; analogical, deductive, argumentative, and hypothetico-deductive reasoning; artificial reasoning with both formal and informal logics.

Teaching Interests

NLP, computational cognitive modeling, modeling human reasoning, automated theorem proving and logical reasoning with AI agents, game AI, etc.

Education

PhD in Computer Science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (2015)
BS in Computer Science with Magna Cum Laude, University of South Alabama (2010)

Honors and Awards

  • Air Force Research Lab Summer Faculty Fellow (2022)
  • Science Central STEM Community Fellow (2016)
  • Sigma Xi (IPFW Chapter) Researcher of the Year (2016)
  • Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator's Program (YIP) award (2015)
  • Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Founders Award of Excellence (2012)