[2] Clancey has been described as having developed “some of the earliest artificial intelligence programs for explanation, the critiquing method of consultation, tutorial discourse, and student modeling,”[3] and his research has been described as including “work practice modeling, distributed multiagent systems, and the ethnography of field science.” He has also participated in Mars Exploration Rover mission operations, “simulation of a day-in-the-life of the ISS, knowledge management for future launch vehicles, and developing flight systems that make automation more transparent.”[3] Clancey’s work on "heuristic classification" and "model construction operators" is regarded as having been influential in the design of expert systems and instructional programs.
During this intergovernmental personnel assignment as a civil servant, he was also employed at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition in Pensacola, where he holds the title of senior research scientist.
He majored in Mathematical Sciences at Rice University in Houston, where in connection with his interest in cognition he took courses in a range of fields, including philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, religion, and sociology.
My work on 'heuristic classification' and 'model construction operators' has been influential in the design of expert systems and instructional programs.”[4] From 1988 to 1997 Clancey was associated with the Institute for Research on Learning in Menlo Park, California,[1] of which he was a founding member.
We emphasized how people succeed in doing their work despite having inadequate tools or incomplete procedures, by studying how they helped and learned from each other.” He has also said that his “broad college background in computer science, philosophy, and anthropology...helped me understand the social scientists at the Institute for Research on Learning, so I could relate what I knew about computer science to what they knew about people.”[7][9] Clancey co-founded Teknowledge, which describes itself as an “IT solutions & ITES company with specialization in Finance Domain, Stocks, Forex, Supply-Chain Management, Enterprise (BOT) Build Operate and Transfer Model & Mobile Development.”[1] He was also a founder of Modernsoft, which produces Financial Genome, “a unique business modeling software for Excel.”[1] He was a founding Editor-in-Chief of AAAI/MIT Press, established by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and The MIT Press in 1989 “as a publishing imprint founded to serve the information needs of the international AI community,”[1][10] and he has also been a Senior Editor of Cognitive Science.
[2] Among his research at NASA has been the use of “work practice simulation to design and evaluate varying configurations of roles and responsibilities for people and automated systems in safety-critical situations.”[8] In a 2000 presentation, Clancey explained how an awareness of the different types of cognition can aid in developing “heuristics for recognizing extraterrestrial intelligence.” For example, participants in SETI “might look for very long phrases, modality blending (e.g., tasting shapes), noise that is actually music, and descriptions that articulate relationships that humans express kinesthetically as gestures and facial expressions.” He also talked about how current “advances in robotics and neuroscience are the beginnings of a process memory architecture that will become the foundation of a successful computational theory of intelligence.” And he pointed out that “consciousness is not a mystical phenomenon or a topic to be shunned, but is instead the key for understanding how human intelligence is possible at all, how it is distinguished from other forms of intelligence on this planet, and indeed, how it is distinguished from current computer systems.
I've done that in the High Arctic of Canada on Devon Island and more recently in the Utah desert, where I was the Station Commander for two weeks.” He said that “For thirty years we've waited to carry space exploration forward.
[4] In a 2010 talk about SETI he noted that “both the nature of consciousness in humans and our belief systems affect our notion of what intelligence can be, how it might communicate, and how we would attempt to communicate with it.” He stressed the importance of “break[ing] out of ways of thinking that are limiting SETI” and asked whether “questioning our assumptions about mortality, purpose, and humanity's long-term role in the Universe [could] inform SETI.”[4] Clancey told an audience in February 2012 that the MER mission “provides a new way of understanding how computer tools and social organization can be orchestrated to extend human capabilities” and that “the story of planetary exploration today is about the relation of people and robotic spacecraft—machines that are actually complex laboratories capable of operating in extreme cold with little power, packaged to handle the vibrations of launch, and work for years without repair.
Sending these scientific instruments throughout the solar system is one of the great successes of the computer age and will surely mark our place in the history of science and exploration.”[11] At the end of a May 2012 talk to a group of Eagle Scouts he addressed the question “Are we alone?
And I feel an immense privilege to be alive now, knowing and enjoying this gift.”[4] He has described his current professional activities as follows: “I am a scientist who helps NASA design human and robotic space missions, including what people will do (astronauts and flight controllers on earth) and the tools they will use (especially computer systems).” He has said that the skills required for his work are the ability “to observe and describe how people think and work (cognitive science, psychology, anthropology/ethnography),” to “invent new kinds of computer systems (computer science),” and “to think about complex interactions and recognize unclear ways of thinking (philosophy, mathematics).” “I have always been a research scientist, rather than a professor,” he has written.
[1] He has described himself as having presented the results of his research “in tutorials and keynote addresses in twenty-two countries.”[4] On an appointment to NASA from the Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (Pensacola), Clancey and his team received the NASA Honor Award and the Johnson Space Center Exceptional Software Award for an “agent” system that automates all routine file transfers between the International Space Station and Mission Control in Houston.
New memories or concepts are embodied as physical relations between structures in the brain that include not only an encoding of some external contents but, very centrally, the perceptual and motor activities making up 'what I am doing now.'
In this view, a few basic processes at the neural level can explain many different aspects of memory.” While Clancey has learned from thinkers like William James and the founders of Gestalt, his original contribution “is a detailed exposition and extension of these basic ideas, revealing the deep links between perceptual-motor skills and higher-level cognition, a detailed re-examination and recasting of well-known cognitive phenomena and models into this 'conceptual coordination' framework, yielding some interesting novel explanations, and a preliminary link to some recent research in neuroscience.”[16] Working on Mars, published by MIT Press, describes how the Mars Exploration Rovers (MRS) have “changed the nature of planetary field science,” enabling his team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena to remotely operate the MRSs on the Martian surface and thus have a virtual experience of being on the red planet themselves.