John E. Laird (born March 16, 1954, in Ann Arbor, Michigan) is a computer scientist who, created the Soar cognitive architecture at Carnegie Mellon University with Paul Rosenbloom and Allen Newell.
Laird was a researcher at Xerox PARC in the Intelligent Systems Laboratory from 1984 to 1986; in 1986, he joined the faculty at the University of Michigan.
His research interests include cognitive architecture, problem-solving, learning, reinforcement learning, episodic memory, semantic memory, and emotion-inspired processing.
He is a Fellow of ACM, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the Cognitive Science Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
This biographical article relating to a computer specialist in the United States is a stub.