Professor Pei Wang
Pei Wang, PhD is Associate Professor of Computer and Information Sciences at Temple University in Philadelphia and one of the founding figures of the contemporary field of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). His research goal is to build a thinking machine — a general-purpose system with intelligence comparable to that of the human mind — by designing and implementing a reasoning system that unifies cognitive facilities such as reasoning, learning, categorizing, planning, problem-solving, and decision-making. His specialties span the foundations of intelligence, reasoning under uncertainty, learning and adaptation, knowledge representation, and decision-making under time pressure.
Pei is the creator of NARS (Non-Axiomatic Reasoning System), a general-purpose intelligent system he has been developing for four decades. NARS is built on his working definition of intelligence as adaptation to the environment while working with insufficient knowledge and resources, and it uniformly explains and reproduces many cognitive functions within a single reasoning framework.
The project’s formal foundation, Non-Axiomatic Logic, departs from mathematical logic to formulate the regularity of actual human thinking, and is documented in his research monographs Rigid Flexibility: The Logic of Intelligence and Non-Axiomatic Logic: A Model of Intelligent Reasoning. An open-source implementation, OpenNARS, is maintained by an international community, and Pei leads the Temple AGI Team (TAGIT) at Temple University. NARS has been applied in collaborative projects with researchers at Cisco and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where Pei participated in the Summer Faculty Research Program in 2013 and 2014.
Pei has played a central organizational role in the AGI research community since its formation. He is Vice Chair of the Artificial General Intelligence Society and Chief Executive Editor of the Journal of Artificial General Intelligence, the society’s peer-reviewed open-access journal. He coedited the field-defining volumes Advances in Artificial General Intelligence (IOS Press, 2007) and Theoretical Foundations of Artificial General Intelligence with our Ben Goertzel, served on the organizing committee of the first Conference on Artificial General Intelligence in 2008, chaired the 2013 conference in Beijing, and remains active in the annual AGI conference series.
His article On Defining Artificial Intelligence, which proposes that intelligence means adaptation with insufficient knowledge and resources, anchored a special issue of the journal with commentaries from researchers across the field and has become one of the most widely cited treatments of the question.
Pei began his career as a Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Peking University from 1986 to 1991 before moving to the United States for his doctoral studies. From 1996 to 2001, he worked in industry applying artificial intelligence techniques, including as Knowledge Engineer at Brightware, Senior Technical Staff at ExpLore Reasoning Systems in 1998, and at Intelligenesis Corporation, where he rose from Senior Software Engineer to Director of Artificial Intelligence and then served as Director of Research of Webmind Inc. (renamed Intelligenesis), the New York AI startup cofounded by Ben Goertzel, from 2000 to 2001.
He joined Temple University in 2001 and has been Associate Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences since September 2008, teaching courses including Artificial General Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence, and Programming Techniques. He was twice a Scholar in Residence at Digital Futures, the research center established by KTH Royal Institute of Technology and partner institutions in Stockholm, between September and November 2022 and in May and June 2023.
Pei earned his PhD in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from Indiana University Bloomington in 1995, where his advisor was Douglas R. Hofstadter, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. His dissertation, Non-Axiomatic Reasoning System: Exploring the Essence of Intelligence, received the Outstanding Dissertation Award from Indiana University’s Cognitive Science Program in 1996.
He earned his Master’s Degree of Science in Computer Science in 1986 and his Bachelor’s Degree of Science in Computer Science in 1983, both from Peking University, with his master’s thesis presenting a reasoning system capable of handling uncertainty. He was also among the translators of the Chinese edition of Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, published by Commercial Press in Beijing in 1997.
Pei’s perspective on AGI has been featured internationally. In 2024, he was interviewed by NHK News, Japan’s public broadcaster, on his AGI research, with his PhD students demonstrating NARS for the program. Read Pei Wang on the Path to Artificial General Intelligence, his in-depth interview with Ben Goertzel in h+ Magazine.
Watch Non-Axiomatic Reasoning System (NARS) Tutorial at AGI-16 and Pei Wang on Artificial General Intelligence — AGI 13 Interview.
Listen to Exploring Artificial General Intelligence with Professor Pei Wang on Temple’s Owl Byte podcast.
Visit his LinkedIn profile, homepage, Google Scholar page, and Curriculum Vitae. Follow him on Facebook and X.