About Me Link to heading

You can find my CV here (Current as of 4/23/2025).

Hello, my name is James Oswald! I am PhD student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and graduate researcher with the The Rensselaer Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning (RAIR) Laboratory, under Professor Selmer Bringsjord. My primary research interest is in Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), that is, how we can best create single AI agents that perform well on general tasks. The rest of my research interests such as machine learning, modal logic, and cognitive architectures all stem from my interest in AGI design.

Before I was a PhD student at RPI, I was an undergraduate computer science and mathematics double major at The State University of New York at Albany (SUNY Albany), where I worked as an undergraduate researcher under Professor Petko Bogdanov in the Data Mining and Management Laboratory doing machine learning research. I also served as the chair of the SUNY Albany IEEE Student chapter, which I still actively participate in as a member of the Board of Trustees.

Current Core Research Interests Link to heading

  • Artificial General Intelligence: How can we build AI systems that perform well on a range of tasks rather than single (“narrow”) tasks?
    • Algorithmic Information Theory based Machine Intelligence Measures: What formalizations do AI researchers use when trying to define the “intelligence” of AI systems? How do these measures relate to each other? What are the shortcomings of these measures? Are fair measures even possible in light of various impossibility theorems?
  • The Intersection of Automated Planning and Large Language Models: How can we leverage the power of automated planners to help LLMs be better reasoners? In particular I look at using LLMs to generate planning domains under various constraints.
  • Formalized Logic and AI in Interactive Theorem Provers: How can we be sure AI behaves in expected ways, can we just prove it? How can we be sure the proof is correct? Computer verify it!

Other Research Areas Link to heading

  • Logic Based Artificial Intelligence: How can we create AI that performs complex reasoning and generate explanations of their reasoning?
    • Many Dimensional Modal Logics: What are the best underlying representations for modality in AI systems? How can we have AI systems reason about obligation, possibility, belief, time, and ontology in a real time computationally feasible manner?
    • Automated Reasoning
  • Machine Learning: Can we integrate strong advances in machine learning for natural language processing and computer vision with logic based AI agents to produce general purpose hybrid agents?
  • Cognitive Architectures: Can we create intelligent agents through computational models of parts of the human mind?