Roger Carl Schank (March 12, 1946 – January 29, 2023) was an American artificial intelligence theorist, cognitive psychologist, learning scientist, educational reformer, and entrepreneur. Beginning in the late 1960s, he 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. He began his career teaching at Yale University and Stanford University. In 1989, Schank was granted $30 million in a ten-year commitment to his research and development by Andersen Consulting, through which he founded the Institute for the Learning Sciences (ILS) at Northwestern University in Chicago. Early life Schank was born in Manhattan, New York, in 1946, and he attended Stuyvesant High School. Academic career For his undergraduate degree, Schank studied mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh PA, and later was awarded a PhD in linguistics at the University of Texas in Austin and went on to work in faculty positions at Stanford University and then at Yale University. In 1974, he became professor of computer science and psychology at Yale University. In 1981, Schank became Chairman of Computer Science at Yale and director of the Yale Artificial Intelligence Project. In 1989, Schank was granted $30 million in a ten-year commitment to his research and development by Andersen Consulting, allowing him to leave Yale and set up the Institute for the Learning Sciences (ILS) at Northwestern University in Chicago, bringing along 25 of his Yale colleagues. ILS attracted other corporate sponsors such as IBM and Ameritech, as well as government sponsors such as the U.S. Army, EPA and the National Guard, leading to a focus on the development of educational software, especially in employee training. ILS was later absorbed by the School of Education as a separate department. When Carnegie Mellon University's Silicon Valley campus was established in 2002, Schank came to serve as Chief Educational Officer at the institution. Entrepreneurship While at Yale in 1979, Schank was among the first to "capitalize on the expected boom" in AI when he founded Cognitive Systems, a company that went public in 1986. Schank resigned as chairman and chief executive in 1988 for personal reasons, but stayed as a board member and advisor. In 1994, Schank founded Cognitive Arts Corporation (originally named Learning Sciences Corporation) to market the software developed at ILS, and led the company until it was sold in 2003. From 2005 to 2007, Schank