Anthony G. Cohn is a British computer scientist who is Professor of Automated Reasoning at the University of Leeds and is associated with the Alan Turing Institute. He is connected with the University of Essex and Patrick J. Hayes. His research focuses on artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, and spatial–temporal reasoning. Cohn is globally recognized for his foundational work in artificial intelligence (AI), specifically in the field of qualitative spatial reasoning and the development of the Region Connection Calculus (RCC).

His honors and awards include being elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng, 2015), as well as receiving the IJCAI Donald E. Walker Award (2015), the Herbert A. Simon Prize (2021), and the EurAI Distinguished Service Award (2024).^[1,2,3,4] He was also featured at AAAI 2026.

Cohn attended Dr Challoner's Grammar School before receiving his BSc and PhD from the University of Essex.^[2] His doctoral thesis, titled Mechanising a Particularly Expressive Many Sorted Logic, was completed in 1983 under the supervision of Patrick Hayes.

After a decade at the University of Warwick, Cohn joined the University of Leeds in 1990, where he founded the research group in Artificial Intelligence. He is also a Fellow and researcher at the Alan Turing Institute, where he collaborates on evaluating foundation models and large language models.^[1] His research primarily focuses on knowledge representation, spatial reasoning, and the integration of vision and language for activity recognition.^[4]

Cohn is widely cited for co-developing the Region Connection Calculus (RCC) with Randell and Cui, a formal language used to describe topological relationships between spatial regions. The 1992 paper introducing this framework received the KR Test-of-Time Classic Paper Award in 2020 for its enduring impact on AI and Geographic Information Science.^[5]

His major honors include the BCS Machine Intelligence Prize in 2004 for the Cogvis project. He was presented with the AAAI Distinguished Service Award in 2012 for "extraordinary and sustained service" to the field of AI, and subsequently received the IJCAI Donald E. Walker Distinguished Service Award in 2015 recognizing his substantial contributions to the international AI community. In 2021, he received the Herbert A. Simon Prize for Advances in Cognitive Systems for his work on qualitative representation and visually-grounded language processing. In 2024, he was awarded both the EurAI Distinguished Service Award for four decades of service to the European AI community and the KR Inc Distinguished Service Award for leadership in the Knowledge Representation and Reasoning community.

He is an elected Fellow of several major scientific and engineering bodies, including the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng, 2015), the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and a Founding Fellow of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI). He is also a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales (FLSW), the British Computer Society (FBCS), and the Institution of Engineering and Technology (FIET).

Selected publications include "A spatial logic based on regions and connection" (1992) by D. A. Randell, Z. Cui, and A. G. Cohn. Another publication is "Qualitative spatial representation and reasoning: An overview" (2001) by A. G. Cohn and S. M. Hazarika, published in Fundamenta Informaticae.