Faculty Directory
Ken Forbus

Walter P. Murphy Professor of Computer Science

Contact

2233 Tech Drive
Mudd Room 3113
Evanston, IL 60208-3109

847-491-7699Email Ken Forbus

Website

Qualitative Reasoning Group

Ken Forbus' Homepage

Departments

Computer Science

Affiliations

Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence

Education

Ph.D. Artificial Intelligence, MIT, Cambridge, MA

S.M. Computer Science, MIT, Cambridge, MA

S.B. Computer Science, MIT, Cambridge, MA


Research Interests

Kenneth D. Forbus is the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Computer Science and Professor of Education at Northwestern University. He received his degrees from MIT (Ph.D. in 1984). His research interests include qualitative reasoning, analogical reasoning and learning, spatial reasoning, sketch understanding, natural language understanding, cognitive architecture, reasoning system design, intelligent educational software, and the use of AI in interactive entertainment. He is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the Cognitive Science Society, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has received the Humboldt Research Award, served as Chair of the Cognitive Science Society and was the inaugural winner of the Herbert A. Simon Prize for Advances in Cognitive Systems.


Selected Publications

  • Olson, Taylor; Salas-Damian, Roberto; Forbus, Kenneth D., Reasoning and Planning with Dynamic Social Norms, International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS) (2025).
  • Olson, Taylor; Forbus, Kenneth D., Normative Testimony and Belief Functions, International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (2024).
  • Olson, Taylor; Forbus, Kenneth D., Mitigating Adversarial Norm Training with Moral Axioms, AAAI Press (2023).
  • Blass, Joseph; Forbus, Kenneth, The Illinois Intentional Tort Qualitative Dataset, IOS Press BV (2022).
  • Rabkina, Irina; Forbus, Kenneth D., An Analogical Model of Pretense, Cognitive Science (2022).
  • Forbus, Kenneth D.; Lovett, Andrew, Same/different in visual reasoning, Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 37:63-68 (2021).
  • Rabkina, Irina; Nakos, Constantine; Forbus, Kenneth D., Anticipatory thinking in multi-agent environments, CEUR Workshop Proceedings 2558 (2020).
  • Forbus, Kenneth D.; Garnier, Bridget; Tikoff, Basil; Marko, Wayne; Usher, Madeline; McLure, Matthew, Sketch worksheets in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics classrooms, AI Magazine 41(1):19-32 (2020).