Cognitive Architectures
Smart machines and the SP theory of intelligence
These notes describe how the "SP theory of intelligence", and its embodiment in the "SP machine", may help to realise cognitive computing, as described in the book "Smart Machines". In the SP system, information compression and a concept of "multiple alignment" are centre stage. The system is designed to integrate such things as unsupervised learning, pattern recognition, probabilistic reasoning, and more. It may help to overcome the problem of variety in big data, it may serve in pattern recognition and in the unsupervised learning of structure in data, and it may facilitate the management and transmission of big data. There is potential, via information compression, for substantial gains in computational efficiency, especially in the use of energy. The SP system may help to realise data-centric computing, perhaps via a development of Hebb's concept of a "cell assembly", or via the use of light or DNA for the processing of information. It has potential in the management of errors and uncertainty in data, in medical diagnosis, in processing streams of data, and in promoting adaptability in robots.
Integrating Metacognition into Artificial Agents
Mbale, Kenneth M. (Bowie State University) | Josyula, Darsana (Bowie State University)
Artificial agents need to adapt in order to performeffectively in situations outside of their normal operation specifications.Agents that do not have the capability to adapt to unanticipated situations cannotrecover from unforeseen failures and hence are brittle systems. One approach todeal with the brittleness problem is to have a metacognitive component thatwatches the performance of a host agent and suggests corrective actions torecover from failures. This paper presents the architecture of a metacognitiveagent that can be integrated with any host cognitive agent so that theresulting system can dynamically create expectations about observations from ahost agent’s sensors, and make use of these expectations to notice expectationviolations, assess the cause of a violation and guide a correction if requiredto deal with the violation. The agent makes use of the metacognitive loop (MCL)and three generic ontologies — indications of failures, causes of failures andresponses to deal with failures. This paper describes the work undertaken toenhance the current version of an MCL based agent with the ability toautomatically generate expectations.
Quantum Entanglement in Concept Combinations
Aerts, Diederik, Sozzo, Sandro
Research in the application of quantum structures to cognitive science confirms that these structures quite systematically appear in the dynamics of concepts and their combinations and quantum-based models faithfully represent experimental data of situations where classical approaches are problematical. In this paper, we analyze the data we collected in an experiment on a specific conceptual combination, showing that Bell's inequalities are violated in the experiment. We present a new refined entanglement scheme to model these data within standard quantum theory rules, where 'entangled measurements and entangled evolutions' occur, in addition to the expected 'entangled states', and present a full quantum representation in complex Hilbert space of the data. This stronger form of entanglement in measurements and evolutions might have relevant applications in the foundations of quantum theory, as well as in the interpretation of nonlocality tests. It could indeed explain some non-negligible 'anomalies' identified in EPR-Bell experiments.
David L Waltz, in Memoriam
Gabriel, Richard P. (IBM) | Finin, Tim (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) | Sun, Ron (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
David L. Waltz (1943-2012), was director, Center for Computational Learning Systems In 1973, Dave Waltz with Richard P. Gabriel in tow headed Dave Waltz delivers his AAAI Presidential Address at AAAI-98 in Madison, Wisconsin. While at Illinois, Dave produced system, paving the way for an engineering-style 11 Ph.D. students and many more MS students, approach to emergent AI techniques; and even mentored junior researchers and postdocs, attracted though their first attempts to create a multidisciplinary new AI faculty, and helped create the Beckman AI degree program failed, Dave was able in Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. In 1984, Marvin Minsky asked Dave to return to During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Waltz's Thinking Machines, Inc., an MIT spinoff in Cambridge group explored new ideas in natural language processing, -- with the temptation that the atmosphere cognitive science, qualitative reasoning, would be like the early days of the AI Lab all over and parallel computation in a collaborative environment again. At the same time he took a parttime including researchers in computer science, tenured position at Brandeis. Machines and Brandeis, Dave developed the ideas He chaired and brought the influential of massively parallel AI and, with Craig Stanfill, the Theoretical Issues in Natural Language Processing memory-based reasoning approach to case-based conference to Urbana in 1978.
Reports of the AAAI 2012 Conference Workshops
Agrawal, Vikas (Infosys Limited) | Baier, Jorge (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile) | Bekris, Kostas (Rutgers University) | Chen, Yiling (Harvard University) | Garcez, Artur S. d' (City University London,) | Avila (Wright State University) | Hitzler, Pascal (Australian National University) | Haslum, Patrik (TU Dortmund) | Jannach, Dietmar (Carnegie Mellon University) | Law, Edith (IBM Research) | Lecue, Freddy (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul) | Lamb, Luis C. (University of Washington) | Matuszek, Cynthia (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid) | Palacios, Hector (IBM Research) | Srivastava, Biplav (Infosys Limited) | Shastri, Lokendra (University of Denver) | Sturtevant, Nathan (Ben Gurion University of the Negev) | Stern, Roni (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) | Tellex, Stefanie (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens) | Vassos, Stavros
The AAAI-12 Workshop program was held Sunday and Monday, July 22–23, 2012 at the Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The AAAI-12 workshop program included 9 workshops covering a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence. The titles of the workshops were Activity Context Representation: Techniques and Languages, AI for Data Center Management and Cloud Computing, Cognitive Robotics, Grounding Language for Physical Systems, Human Computation, Intelligent Techniques for Web Personalization and Recommendation, Multiagent Pathfinding, Neural-Symbolic Learning and Reasoning, Problem Solving Using Classical Planners, Semantic Cities. This article presents short summaries of those events.
Preface
Burgard, Wolfram (Albert-Ludwigs-Universitat Freiburg)
All aspects of cognitive robotics are of interest to the workshop, especially discussions and demonstrations of implemented systems. Research in robotics has traditionally emphasized low-level sensing and control tasks including sensory processing, path planning, and manipulator design and control. In contrast, research in cognitive robotics is concerned with endowing robots and soware agents with higher level cognitive functions that enable them to reason, act and perceive in changing, incompletely known, and unpredictable environments. Such robots must, for example, be able to reason about goals, actions, when to perceive and what to look for, the cognitive states of other agents, time, resources, collaborative task execution, etc. In short, cognitive robotics is concerned with integrating reasoning, perception, and action within a uniform theoretical and implementation framework (using methods drawn from logic, probability and decision theory, reinforcement learning, game theory, and so on).
Cognitive Robotics Using the Soar Cognitive Architecture
Laird, John Edwin (University of Michigan) | Kinkade, Keegan R. (University of Michigan) | Mohan, Shiwali (University of Michigan) | Xu, Joseph Z. (University of Michigan)
Our long-term goal is to develop autonomous robotic systems that have the cognitive abilities of humans, including communication, coordination, adapting to novel situations, and learning through experience. Our approach rests on the integration of the Soar cognitive architecture with both virtual and physical robotic systems. Soar has been used to develop a wide variety of knowledge-rich agents for complex virtual environments, including distributed training environments and interactive computer games. For development and testing in robotic virtual environments, Soar interfaces to a variety of robotic simulators and a simple mobile robot. We have recently made significant extensions to Soar that add new memories and new non-symbolic reasoning to Soar’s original symbolic processing, which improves Soar abilities for control of robots. These extensions include mental imagery, episodic and semantic memory, reinforcement learning, and continuous model learning. This paper presents research in mobile robotics, relational and continuous model learning, and learning by situated, interactive instruction.
Unsurpervised Learning in Hybrid Cognitive Architectures
Vinokurov, Yury (Carnegie Mellon University) | Lebiere, Christian (Carnegie Mellon University) | Wyatte, Dean ( University of Colorado, Boulder ) | Herd, Seth (University of Colorado, Boulder) | O' (University of Colorado, Boulder) | Reilly, Randall
We present a model of unsupervised learning in the hybrid SAL (Synthesis of ACT-R and Leabra) architecture. This model follows the hypothesis that higher evaluative cognitive mechanisms can serve to provide training signals for perceptual learning. This addresses the problem that supervised learning seems necessary for strong perceptual performance, but explicit feedback is rare in the real world and difficult to provide for artificial learning systems. The hybrid model couples the perceptual strengths of Leabra with ACT-R's cognitive mechanisms, specifically its declarative memory, to evolve its own symbolic representations of objects encountered in the world. This is accomplished by presenting the objects to the Leabra visual system and committing the resulting representation to ACT-R's declarative memory. Subsequent presentations are either recalled as instances of a previous object category, in which case the positive association with the representation is rehearsed by Leabra, or they cause ACT-R to generate new category labels, which are also subject to the same rehearsal. The rehearsals drive the network's representations to convergence for a given category; at the same time, rehearsals on the ACT-R side reinforce the chunks that encode the associations between representation and label. In this way, the hybrid model bootstraps itself into learning new categories and their associated features; this framework provides a potential approach to solving the symbol grounding problem. We outline the operations of the hybrid model, evaluate its performance on the CU3D-100 (cu3d.colorado.edu) image set, and discuss further potential improvements to the model, including the integration of motor functions as a way of providing an internal feedback signal to augment and guide a purely bottom-up unsupervised system.