Stan Franklin (August 14, 1931 – January 23, 2023 ) was an American scientist. He was the W. Harry Feinstone Interdisciplinary Research Professor at the University of Memphis in Memphis, Tennessee, and co-director of the Institute of Intelligent Systems. He is the author of Artificial Minds, (MIT Press, 1995) and the developer of IDA and its successor LIDA, both computational implementations of Global Workspace Theory. He is the founder of the Cognitive Computing Research Group at the University of Memphis.

Life and work

Franklin was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1931. His graduate degrees are from UCLA, and his undergraduate degree is from the University of Memphis. He has been on the faculties of the University of Florida, the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Memphis. He was formerly a mathematician, who introduced the concept of sequential spaces. He then became first a computer scientist and then a cognitive scientist, Franklin has worked for some years on "conscious" software agents, which model the global workspace theory of consciousness. These autonomous agents computationally model human and animal cognition, and provide testable hypotheses for cognitive scientists and neuroscientists. This work was funded by the United States Navy and has been the subject of numerous papers in scientific journals and conference proceedings.

Publications

Franklin 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.