Dr. Sean Kugele
Sean Kugele, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, and a member of the Cognitive Computing Research Group at the University of Memphis. His research addresses artificial intelligence, cognitive modeling, and neuro-symbolic systems, and his goal is to understand how natural minds such as human minds work and to implement biologically-inspired software systems based on the same principles. Sean worked for more than a decade as a software engineer and software architect before returning to academic life full-time in 2018.
Within the Department of Computer Science at Rhodes, his listed research interests span artificial intelligence, neuro-symbolic systems, cognitive modeling, and bio-inspired computing. He teaches Reinforcement Learning and Senior Software Engineering, and he taught Senior Software Engineering in the fall of 2024.
Sean has worked on the LIDA (Learning Intelligent Decision Agent) cognitive architecture since 2012, collaborating closely with its principal developer, our late Stan Franklin, who founded the Cognitive Computing Research Group and cofounded the Institute for Intelligent Systems at the University of Memphis.
LIDA models a broad spectrum of cognition in biological systems, from low-level perception and action through high-level reasoning, and it is empirically grounded in cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience. Sean’s contributions center on hybrid symbolic and non-symbolic representational systems, embodied simulation-based cognition, multi-modal perception, and procedural learning. Read Learning in LIDA, his survey and synthesis of the architecture’s learning mechanisms, published with Franklin in Cognitive Systems Research in 2021.
Working alongside Franklin and a group of philosophers and cognitive scientists at the University of Memphis, Sean coauthored a series of papers extending LIDA into embodied and phenomenological territory, treating body schema, long-term intention, and skilled unreflective action as problems a cognitive architecture must actually solve.
Read Body Schema in Autonomous Agents, Modeling Long-Term Intentions and Narratives in Autonomous Agents, and Embodied Intelligence: Smooth Coping in the Learning Intelligent Decision Agent Cognitive Architecture.
With Alexander Hölken and Albert Newen of Ruhr-Universität Bochum, he modeled how the embodied and narrative aspects of an agent’s selfhood develop and interact over time. Read Modeling interactions between the embodied and the narrative self: Dynamics of the self-pattern within LIDA.
Sean is a coauthor of A LIDA cognitive model tutorial, the reference description of the LIDA conceptual model, and of Artificial Motivation for Cognitive Software Agents, which presents a feelings-based motivational system integrated into the architecture at a fundamental level. His conference work includes General intelligence requires autonomous, cognitive, intentional agents, presented at the Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems in 2020. His papers with the group are collected in the University of Memphis CCRG Papers archive.
His most recent single-author paper adapts Gary Drescher’s schema mechanism to implement LIDA’s Procedural Memory and Action Selection modules, and it demonstrates that an agent built on that implementation can construct an accurate internal model of its environmental interactions and use that model to select goal-directed behaviors. Read Constructivist procedural learning for grounded cognitive agents, published in Cognitive Systems Research in 2025, and the accompanying preprint.
Sean earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Memphis in May 2023 with the dissertation Embodied, Simulation-Based Cognition: A Hybrid Approach, supervised by Stan Franklin. The dissertation develops a hybrid modal and amodal account of embodied, simulation-based cognition built on a neuro-symbolic implementation of LIDA, addressing grounded multimodal perception and perceptual learning, action selection and procedural learning, and mental imagery and simulation-based reasoning. Read the full dissertation.
He earned his Bachelor of Science from Christian Brothers University in 2003 and his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Montana in 1999, holding undergraduate degrees in computer science, mathematics, and anthropology.
Before returning to academia, Sean spent his career building production software. He worked as a software engineer at Northrop Grumman and later as a solution architect and Technical Principal at FedEx Services in Memphis, where he architected large-scale distributed software systems.
He first encountered Franklin’s work in the spring of 2004, in an artificial intelligence course taken shortly after completing his undergraduate degree at Christian Brothers University, and he entered the doctoral program at the University of Memphis in 2011.
In 2021, Sean was an invited speaker at the Virtual International Symposium on Cognitive Architecture (VISCA), hosted by the Soar Research Group at the University of Michigan and organized by John E. Laird, where he presented A theory-driven, incremental approach to constructing minds alongside researchers including Matt Botvinick, Randall O’Reilly, Paul Rosenbloom, Christian Lebiere, and Kristinn R. Thórisson. See the VISCA 2021 speaker roster.
With Art Graesser and Steve Strain, he prepared Academic World of Stan Franklin, a University of Memphis digital exhibit documenting Franklin’s career and his influence on cognitive science and artificial intelligence.
Visit his Google Scholar profile, which records more than 240 citations, his ResearchGate profile, his dblp bibliography, and his Cognitive Computing Research Group member page.