"Roger Schank has pioneered many important ideas about how knowledge might be represented in the human mind. In the early 1970s, he developed a concept of semantics that he called "conceptual dependency," which plays an important role in my book The Society of Mind. He's also developed other paradigms, involving representing knowledge in various types of networks, scripts, and storylike forms."
- Marvin Minsky

"The Roger Schank I knew was a thorn in everybody's side — constructively so. The interesting thing about Roger Schank, something he shares with Minsky, is the fact that he's produced an incredible string of students. Anybody who's produced such a great string of students has to be a constructive pain in the ass. He's always taken an adversarial stance in his theories. He doesn't just say, "Here's my theory." He says, "Here's why I'm right and everybody else is an idiot." He's often right."
- W. Daniel Hillis

"I've always relished Schank's role as a gadfly and as a naysayer, a guerrilla in the realm of cognitive science, always asking big questions, always willing to discard his own earlier efforts and say they were radically incomplete for interesting reasons. He's a gadfly and a good one."
- Daniel C. Dennett

Roger Schank is the Chief Learning Officer of Trump University. He is also the CEO of Socratic Arts. He was Chief Education Officer of Carnegie Mellon West and Distinguished Career Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University from 2001-2004. He founded he renowned Institute for the Learning Sciences at Northwestern University in 1989 where he is John P. Evans Professor Emeritus in Computer Science, Education and Psychology. 

From 1974-1989, he was Professor of computer science and psychology at Yale University, Chairman of the Computer Science department, and Director of the Yale Artificial Intelligence Project.  He was a visiting professor at the University of Paris VII, and Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Linguistics at Stanford University and research fellow at the Institute for Semantics and Cognition in Switzerland.  He is a fellow of the AAAI and was founder of the Cognitive Science Society and co-founder of the Journal of Cognitive Science.  He holds a Ph.D. in linguistics from University of Texas.

In 1994, he founded Cognitive Arts Corp, a company that designed and built high quality multimedia simulations for use in corporate training and for on line university level courses. The latter were built in partnership with Columbia University.

In  2002 he founded Socratic Arts Inc, a company that is devoted to make high quality e-learning by doing affordable for both businesses and schools.

He is the author of more than 20 books on learning, language, artificial intelligence, education, memory, reading, e-learning, and story telling. Some recent ones are Coloring Outside the Lines: Raising a Smarter Kid by Breaking All the Rules; Engines for Education, Making Minds Less Well Educated Than Our Own; Designing World Class E-Learning; Lessons in Learning, e-learning; and Training: perspective and guidance for the enlightened trainer.

He received the American Society for Training & Development Award for Distinguished Contributions to Workplace Learning and Performance June, 2001, and was named the number one e-learning guru by Epic Group in the United Kingdom in 2005.

Further reading on Edge:

"Information is Surprises" — in The Third Culture

"The Disrespected Student — or — The Need for the Virtual University": A Talk with Roger Schank.