Publications and CV

Link to CV: PDF

Publications

Formally Refereed Publications

  1. Mitsopoulos, K., Somers, S., Schooler, J., Lebiere, C., Pirolli, P., Thomson, R. (2021).  Towards a Psychology of Deep Reinforcement Learning Agents Using a Cognitive Architecture. TOPICS in Cognitive Science. DOI: 10.1111/tops.12573
    • In this work we develop models of AIs and human players in a common framework to afford direct comparison of their ‘mental model’. We use cognitive salience to introspect on the action decisions of the AI and the human player to reveal what features most influence the respective decisions. We demonstrate how our common model technique can be used to identify missing representations in the AI and divergent strategies when comparing to the human model.
  2. *Somers, S. (2021). Modeling aperture passage affordances in ACT-R 3D. Paper presented at Virtual MathPsych/ICCM 2021. Via mathpsych.org/presentation/603
  3. *Somers, S., Oltramari, A., Lebiere, C. (2020). Cognitive Twin: A Personal Assistant Embedded in a Cognitive Architecture. In Proceedings of the 18thAnnual Conference on Cognitive Modeling (ICCM2020)
    • In this work we explore using a memory system from a computational cognitive model as a machine learner to make a personalized “twin” or decision maker. Human decision making is affected (sometimes for better, sometimes for worse) by well known cognitive biases. We generate data in a simulation and use it to ‘train’ a cognitive model that is capable of making decisions similar to the individual who made the past decisions.
  4. *Cranford, E., Somers, S., Mitsopoulos, K., Lebiere, C. (2020) Cognitive Salience of Features in Cyber-attacker Decision Making. In Proceedings of the 18th Annual Conference on Cognitive Modeling (ICCM2020)
    • In this work apply cognitive salience to understand what motivates decision makes in a cyber-security decision making task. This is the first application of my cognitive salience algorithm to human decision making.
  5. Somers, S., Oltramari, A., Lebiere, C. (2020). Cognitive Twin: A Cognitive Approach to Personalized Assistants. In AAAI Sprint Symposium: Combining Machine Learning with Knowledge Engineering (1).
  6. *Mitsopoulos, K., Somers, S., Lebiere, C., & Thomson, R. (2020) Cognitive Architectures for Introspecting Deep Reinforcement Learning Agent. In Workshop on Bridging AI and Cognitive Science. (ICLR, 2020)
  7. Somers, S., Mitsopoulos K., Thomson, R., Lebiere, C. (2019) Cognitive-Level Salience for Explainable Artificial Intelligence. In the Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Cognitive Modeling (ICCM2019) (pp. 235-240), Montreal, QC, Canada.
    • In this work we introduce a novel algorithm, cognitive salience, which calculates the degree of influence features have on a decision. Inspired by pixel gradient techniques in the XAI field, but designed for symbolic, human-understandable features. In this paper we demonstrate that our salience technique is agnostic with respect to the agent being modeled, whether it be an RL or some form of symbolic AI (GOFAI).
  8. Somers, S., Mitsopoulos, K., Thomson, R., Lebiere, C. (2018) Explaining Decisions of a Deep Reinforcement Learner with a Cognitive Architecture, Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Cognitive Modeling (ICCM2018) (pp. 144-149), Madison, WI, USA.
  9. Somers, S. (2017) Geometry-based Affordances. Submitted to the 39 th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, London, UK: Cognitive Science.
  10. Somers, S., (2016) ACT-R 3D: A 3D simulation environment for python ACT-R. In D. Reitter & F. E. Ritter (Eds.), Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Cognitive Modeling (pp. 107-112). University Park, PA: Penn State
  11. Somers, S. (2014) Symbolic approach to affordances in SGOMS, a paper for the affordances in Vision for the Cognitive Robotics Workshop. Proceedings from the first workshop on Affordances (RSS 2014). Berkley, USA.
  12. Cebulski, S. & Somers, S. (2014) ACT-R models of a delayed match-to-sample task. Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Quebec City, QC.
  13. Vertolli, M., Breault, V., Ouellet, S., Somers, S., Gagne, J., & Davies, J. (2014) Theoretical Assessment of the SOILIE Model of the Human Imagination. Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Quebec City, QC.
  14. Breault, V., Ouellet, S., Somers, S., & Davies, J. (2013) SOILIE: A Computational Model of 2D Visual Imagination. In R. West & T. Stewart (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Cognitive Modelling. Ottawa: Carleton University.
  15. Ouellet, S., Somers, S., & Davies, J. (2013). High-level representation of 3D models of buildings. In R. West & T. Stewart (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Cognitive Modelling. Ottawa: Carleton University.
  16. Somers, S. & West, R. (2013). Steering Control in a Flight Simulator Using ACT-R. In R. West & T. Stewart (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Cognitive Modelling, Ottawa: Carleton University.
  17. West, R., Hancock, E., Somers, S., MacDougall, K., & Jeanson, F. (2013) The micro architecture hypothesis: Applications to modeling teamwork and conflict resolution in R. West & T. Stewart (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Cognitive Modelling. Ottawa: Carleton University.
  18. *Somers, S., Gagné, J., Astudillo, C. & Davies, J. (2011).  Using semantic similarity to predict angle and distance of objects in images. The ACM Conference on Creative & Cognition, November 3-6, Atlanta, Georgia.
  19. Somers, S. & Jeanson, F. (2011). Transductionally Bounded Hierarchical Systems. In L. Carlson, C. Hölsher, & T. Shipley (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 3376-3380). Boston, MA: Cognitive Science Society.
  20. West, R. & Somers, S. (2011). Scaling up from Micro Cognition to Macro Cognition: Using SGOMS to build Macro Cognitive Models of Sociotechnical Work in ACT-R. In L. Carlson, C. Hölsher, & T. Shipley (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1788-1793). Boston, MA: Cognitive Science Society.

Publications Under Review

  1. Thomson, R., Cranford, E. A., Somers, S., Lebiere C. (under review).  Achieving Active Cybersecurity Through Agent-Based Cognitive Models for Detection and Defense. Under review for AICA 2021 Special Issue
  2. Stefik, M., Youngblood, M., Pirolli, P., Lebiere, C., Thomson, R., Price, R., Nelson, L., Krivacic, R., Mitsopoulos, K., Somers, S., Schooler, J. (under review). Explaining Autonomous Drones: An XAI Journey. Submitted to Applied AI Letters