Roger Schank was born in the United States in 1946. He studied mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University and received a PhD in linguistics at the University of Texas in Austin and then attained faculty positions first at Stanford University and then at Yale University.
Beginning in the late 1960s, Schank pioneered conceptual dependency theory within the context of natural language understanding and case-based reasoning, both of which challenged cognitivist views of memory and reasoning. In 1974, he became professor of computer science and psychology at Yale University. In 1981, he became chairman of computer science at Yale and director of the Yale Artificial Intelligence Project.
Schank received a $30 million grant in 1989 from Andersen Consulting and left Yale to set up the Institute for the Learning Sciences (ILS) at Northwestern University in Chicago. He founded Cognitive Arts Corporation in 1994 to market software developed at ILS. Starting in 2002, Schank served as chief educational officer at Carnegie Mellon University's Silicon Valley campus. In the 2000s, he also founded the e-learning software companies Socratic Arts and XTOL (Experiential Training Online).
Schank delivered the Beatty Lecture on March 19, 1996, titled “Why Most Schooling is Irrelevant: Computers and the Future of Learning”.
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