TOVIFIT
A Review of 40 Years of Cognitive Architecture Research: Core Cognitive Abilities and Practical Applications
Kotseruba, Iuliia, Tsotsos, John K.
In this paper we present a broad overview of the last 40 years of research on cognitive architectures. Although the number of existing architectures is nearing several hundred, most of the existing surveys do not reflect this growth and focus on a handful of well-established architectures. Thus, in this survey we wanted to shift the focus towards a more inclusive and high-level overview of the research on cognitive architectures. Our final set of 84 architectures includes 49 that are still actively developed, and borrow from a diverse set of disciplines, spanning areas from psychoanalysis to neuroscience. To keep the length of this paper within reasonable limits we discuss only the core cognitive abilities, such as perception, attention mechanisms, action selection, memory, learning and reasoning. In order to assess the breadth of practical applications of cognitive architectures we gathered information on over 900 practical projects implemented using the cognitive architectures in our list. We use various visualization techniques to highlight overall trends in the development of the field. In addition to summarizing the current state-of-the-art in the cognitive architecture research, this survey describes a variety of methods and ideas that have been tried and their relative success in modeling human cognitive abilities, as well as which aspects of cognitive behavior need more research with respect to their mechanistic counterparts and thus can further inform how cognitive science might progress.
Mammalian Value Systems
Characterizing human values is a topic deeply interwoven with the sciences, humanities, art, and many other human endeavors. In recent years, a number of thinkers have argued that accelerating trends in computer science, cognitive science, and related disciplines foreshadow the creation of intelligent machines which meet and ultimately surpass the cognitive abilities of human beings, thereby entangling an understanding of human values with future technological development. Contemporary research accomplishments suggest sophisticated AI systems becoming widespread and responsible for managing many aspects of the modern world, from preemptively planning users' travel schedules and logistics, to fully autonomous vehicles, to domestic robots assisting in daily living. The extrapolation of these trends has been most forcefully described in the context of a hypothetical "intelligence explosion," in which the capabilities of an intelligent software agent would rapidly increase due to the presence of feedback loops unavailable to biological organisms. The possibility of superintelligent agents, or simply the widespread deployment of sophisticated, autonomous AI systems, highlights an important theoretical problem: the need to separate the cognitive and rational capacities of an agent from the fundamental goal structure, or value system, which constrains and guides the agent's actions. The "value alignment problem" is to specify a goal structure for autonomous agents compatible with human values. In this brief article, we suggest that recent ideas from affective neuroscience and related disciplines aimed at characterizing neurological and behavioral universals in the mammalian kingdom provide important conceptual foundations relevant to describing human values. We argue that the notion of "mammalian value systems" points to a potential avenue for fundamental research in AI safety and AI ethics.
Face-reading AI will be able to detect your politics and IQ, professor says
Michal Kosinski – the Stanford University professor who went viral last week for research suggesting that artificial intelligence (AI) can detect whether people are gay or straight based on photos – said sexual orientation was just one of many characteristics that algorithms would be able to predict through facial recognition. Kosinski, an assistant professor of organizational behavior, said he was studying links between facial features and political preferences, with preliminary results showing that AI is effective at guessing people's ideologies based on their faces. That means political leanings are possibly linked to genetics or developmental factors, which could result in detectable facial differences. Facial recognition may also be used to make inferences about IQ, said Kosinski, suggesting a future in which schools could use the results of facial scans when considering prospective students.
Instagram photos reveal predictive markers of depression
The advent of social media presents a promising new opportunity for early detection and intervention in psychiatric disorders. Predictive screening methods have successfully analyzed online media to detect a number of harmful health conditions [1–11]. All of these studies relied on text analysis, however, and none have yet harnessed the wealth of psychological data encoded in visual social media, such as photographs posted to Instagram. In this report, we introduce a methodology for analyzing photographic data from Instagram to predictively screen for depression. There is good reason to prioritize research into Instagram analysis for health screening.
Veritas Genomics Scoops Up an AI Company to Sort Out Its *DNA*
Genes carry the information that make you you. So it's fitting that, when sequenced and stored in a computer, your genome takes up gobs of memory--up to 150 gigabytes. Multiply that across all the people who have gotten sequenced, and you're looking at some serious storage issues. If that's not enough, mining those genomes for useful insight means comparing them all to each other, to medical histories, and to the millions of scientific papers about genetics. Sorting all that out is a perfect task for artificial intelligence.
Oh, Snap! Scientists Are Turning People's Food Photos Into Recipes
You already know what all of your friends are eating, so you might as well know how to make it, too. You already know what all of your friends are eating, so you might as well know how to make it, too. When someone posts a photo of food on social media, do you get cranky? Is it because you just don't care what other people are eating? Or is it because they're enjoying an herb-and-garlic crusted halibut at a seaside restaurant while you sit at your computer with a slice of two-day-old pizza?
Spacetimes with Semantics (III) - The Structure of Functional Knowledge Representation and Artificial Reasoning
Using the previously developed concepts of semantic spacetime, I explore the interpretation of knowledge representations, and their structure, as a semantic system, within the framework of promise theory. By assigning interpretations to phenomena, from observers to observed, we may approach a simple description of knowledge-based functional systems, with direct practical utility. The focus is especially on the interpretation of concepts, associative knowledge, and context awareness. The inference seems to be that most if not all of these concepts emerge from purely semantic spacetime properties, which opens the possibility for a more generalized understanding of what constitutes a learning, or even `intelligent' system. Some key principles emerge for effective knowledge representation: 1) separation of spacetime scales, 2) the recurrence of four irreducible types of association, by which intent propagates: aggregation, causation, cooperation, and similarity, 3) the need for discrimination of identities (discrete), which is assisted by distinguishing timeline simultaneity from sequential events, and 4) the ability to learn (memory). It is at least plausible that emergent knowledge abstraction capabilities have their origin in basic spacetime structures. These notes present a unified view of mostly well-known results; they allow us to see information models, knowledge representations, machine learning, and semantic networking (transport and information base) in a common framework. The notion of `smart spaces' thus encompasses artificial systems as well as living systems, across many different scales, e.g. smart cities and organizations.
Probabilistic Graphical Models for Credibility Analysis in Evolving Online Communities
One of the major hurdles preventing the full exploitation of information from online communities is the widespread concern regarding the quality and credibility of user-contributed content. Prior works in this domain operate on a static snapshot of the community, making strong assumptions about the structure of the data (e.g., relational tables), or consider only shallow features for text classification. To address the above limitations, we propose probabilistic graphical models that can leverage the joint interplay between multiple factors in online communities --- like user interactions, community dynamics, and textual content --- to automatically assess the credibility of user-contributed online content, and the expertise of users and their evolution with user-interpretable explanation. To this end, we devise new models based on Conditional Random Fields for different settings like incorporating partial expert knowledge for semi-supervised learning, and handling discrete labels as well as numeric ratings for fine-grained analysis. This enables applications such as extracting reliable side-effects of drugs from user-contributed posts in healthforums, and identifying credible content in news communities. Online communities are dynamic, as users join and leave, adapt to evolving trends, and mature over time. To capture this dynamics, we propose generative models based on Hidden Markov Model, Latent Dirichlet Allocation, and Brownian Motion to trace the continuous evolution of user expertise and their language model over time. This allows us to identify expert users and credible content jointly over time, improving state-of-the-art recommender systems by explicitly considering the maturity of users. This also enables applications such as identifying helpful product reviews, and detecting fake and anomalous reviews with limited information.
Bias and high-dimensional adjustment in observational studies of peer effects
Peer effects, in which the behavior of an individual is affected by the behavior of their peers, are posited by multiple theories in the social sciences. Other processes can also produce behaviors that are correlated in networks and groups, thereby generating debate about the credibility of observational (i.e. nonexperimental) studies of peer effects. Randomized field experiments that identify peer effects, however, are often expensive or infeasible. Thus, many studies of peer effects use observational data, and prior evaluations of causal inference methods for adjusting observational data to estimate peer effects have lacked an experimental "gold standard" for comparison. Here we show, in the context of information and media diffusion on Facebook, that high-dimensional adjustment of a nonexperimental control group (677 million observations) using propensity score models produces estimates of peer effects statistically indistinguishable from those from using a large randomized experiment (220 million observations). Naive observational estimators overstate peer effects by 320% and commonly used variables (e.g., demographics) offer little bias reduction, but adjusting for a measure of prior behaviors closely related to the focal behavior reduces bias by 91%. High-dimensional models adjusting for over 3,700 past behaviors provide additional bias reduction, such that the full model reduces bias by over 97%. This experimental evaluation demonstrates that detailed records of individuals' past behavior can improve studies of social influence, information diffusion, and imitation; these results are encouraging for the credibility of some studies but also cautionary for studies of rare or new behaviors. More generally, these results show how large, high-dimensional data sets and statistical learning techniques can be used to improve causal inference in the behavioral sciences.
How my research in AI put my dad out of a job – Snips Blog – Medium
Back in 2007, when London was booming as the financial capital of the world, a new field called "algorithmic trading" was emerging. In essence, it is about leveraging Artificial Intelligence to place bets on financials markets faster than any human can. Like most PhD students doing AI, I was working with banks to help them build their trading algorithms, which back then represented about 3% of their activity. Fast forward to 2017, and this type of trading represents over 90% in some cases, almost completely replacing human traders in big banks. One of those victims turned out to be my own dad, a trader who worked passionately for over 40 years.