For years, marketers have talked about brands as having personalities. Now they have the tools to bring those brands to life – virtually at least. Rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI) are being combined with Academy Award-winning animation skills to create virtual humans that are the closest yet to flesh and blood. And for brands, that offers the opportunity to put a very human-looking face on a corporate body. One of the latest iterations of these virtual humans comes from Auckland-based company, Soul Machines, whose co-founder and CEO, Mark Sagar's ground-breaking work in computer-generated faces on films, King Kong and Avatar, was recognised with consecutive Oscars.

Should Artificial Intelligence strive to model and understand human cognitive and perceptual systems? Should it operate at a more abstract mathematical level of characterizing possible intelligent action, independent of human performance? Or, should it focus on building working programs that exhibit increasingly expert behavior, irrespective of theoretical or psychological conccrlls? These questions lie at the heart of most current, debate on whether AI is a science, an art, or a new branch of engineering In fact, some researchers believe it is all three and consequently build systems that perform some interesting task, arguing for the "theoretical significance" and "psychological validity" of the approach. In fact, it assumes the cognitive psychology paradigm as central and suggests that AI research would benefit from closer adherence to the data and methods of psychological research We welcome contributions in support of other research methodologies in AI, as well as discussions com-Rcscarch for this paper was conducted at the LJniversity of Chicago Center for Cognitive Science under a grant.

Developing cognitive agents with human-level natural language understanding (NLU) capabilities requires modeling human cognition because natural, unedited utterances regularly contain ambiguities, ellipses, production errors, implicatures, and many other types of complexities. Moreover, cognitive agents must be nimble in the face of incomplete interpretations since even people do not perfectly understand every aspect of every utterance they hear. So, once an agent has reached the best interpretation it can, it must determine how to proceed – be that acting upon the new information directly, remembering an incomplete interpretation and waiting to see what happens next, seeking out information to fill in the blanks, or asking its interlocutor for clarification. The reasoning needed to support NLU extends far beyond language itself, including, non-exhaustively, the agent’s understanding of its own plans and goals; its dynamic modeling of its interlocutor’s knowledge, plans, and goals, all guided by a theory of mind; its recognition of diverse aspects human behavior, such as affect, cooperative behavior, and the effects of cognitive biases; and its integration of linguistic interpretations with its interpretations of other perceptive inputs, such as simulated vision and non-linguistic audition. Considering all of these needs, it seems hardly possible that fundamental NLU will ever be achieved through the kinds of knowledge-lean text-string manipulation being pursued by the mainstream natural language processing (NLP) community. Instead, it requires a holistic approach to cognitive modeling of the type we are pursuing in a paradigm called OntoAgent.

It is 1955, and in the corridors of RAND (Research and Development) Corporation, America's non-profit global policy think-tank, a printer is printing out a map using punctuation marks and symbols. Maybe, but it was also the moment that inspired the development of a phenomenon that is touted be the fundamental determinant of future societies - Artificial Intelligence. Herbert A. Simon, a political scientist, Allen Newell, a researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology and Cliff Shaw, a programmer par excellence, came together after that fateful moment of observing the printer. Simon realized a machine's manipulative capabilities that could simulate decision making, akin to the process of human thought. Thus began their journey to create the Logic Theorist, a program engineered to mimic the problem-solving skills of a human being which are also revered as'the first artificial intelligence program.' Cut to 2017 and AI seems to be the only thing everyone is talking about.

Telltale's original Walking Dead game was special, blending a gut-wrenching storyline with interesting, believable characters. Five years and two seasons later (four if you count 400 Days and Michonne) the adventure has started to show its age. So for The Walking Dead Collection -- a new bundle that launches on December 5th -- the developer has given everything a visual upgrade. To explain the changes, Telltale has released a video comparing the two versions during a pivotal scene -- Lee and Clementine's first meeting. At first, the differences might seem small.

As climate change continues to cause a reduction in Arctic sea ice and overall ice cover in the polar region, the already threatened polar bears are beginning to display highly unusual behavior. Largely solitary animals in their adult life, dozens of them were seen together recently on an island in northeast Russia. A tourist boat passing by Wrangel Island, off the coast of Chukotka in Russia's Far East, saw over 200 polar bears on a mountain slope on the island. Dozens of the animals were seen at the bottom of the slope, eating the carcass of a bowhead whale that had washed ashore. The incident took place in September, but wasn't widely reported at the time.

We believe that a Standard Model of the Mind should take into account continuous state representations, continuous timing, continuous actions, continuous learning, and parallel control loops. For each of these, we describe initial models that we have made exploring these directions. While we have demonstrated that it is possible to construct high-level cognitive models with these features (which are uncommon in most cognitive modeling approaches), there are many theoretical challenges still to be faced to allow these features to interact in useful ways and to characterize what may be gained by including these features.

Because navigation produces readily observable actions, it provides an important window into how perception and reasoning support intelligent behavior. This paper summarizes recent results in navigation from the perspectives of cognitive neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and cognitive robotics. Together they argue for the significance of a learned spatial cognitive model. The feasibility of such a model for navigation is demonstrated, and important issues raised for a standard model of the mind.

For centuries, scientists who have dedicated their lives to studying the human brain have attempted to unlock its mysteries. The role the brain plays in human personality -- as well as the myriad of disorders and conditions that come along with it -- is often difficult to study because studying the organ while it's still functioning in a human body is complicated. Now, researchers at The Allen Institute for Brain Science have introduced a new tool that could make such study a whole lot easier: functioning virtual brain cells. The fully 3D computer models of living human brain tissue are based on actual brain samples that were left over after surgery, and present what could be the most powerful testbed for studying the human brain ever created. The samples used to construct the virtual models was healthy tissue that was removed during brain operations, and represents parts of the brain that are typically associated with thoughts and consciousness, as well as memory.

The human brain is capable of incredible things, but it's also extremely flawed at times. Science has shown that we tend to make all sorts of mental mistakes, called "cognitive biases", that can affect both our thinking and actions. These biases can lead to us extrapolating information from the wrong sources, seeking to confirm existing beliefs, or failing to remember events the way they actually happened! To be sure, this is all part of being human – but such cognitive biases can also have a profound effect on our endeavors, investments, and life in general. For this reason, today's infographic from DesignHacks.co is particularly handy.