Movies like I, Robot, Wall-e and Bicentennial Man pose interesting questions that blur lines between man and machines. Now that we step forward into the "cognitive era" with machines capable of thinking and taking decisions just like humans, the question of what should be the guiding star for our actions is gaining a newfound importance. This is yet another issue that we must contend with, and that is – we must decide as to not only which ethical principles must be encoded into our man-made machines to think like us, but also how to encode these ethics. While for the most part, "Thou shalt not kill" remains a cornerstone of a principle for coding intelligence in AI.

For example, when you think of your friend's face, a pattern of neural firing occurs in the neocortex that is similar to the one that occurs when you are actually seeing your friend's face. The neuron is responsible for learning, and the complexities of real neurons are what make it a powerful learning machine. Intelligent machines don't have to model all the complexity of biological neurons, but the capabilities enabled by dendrites and learning by rewiring are essential. Sparse representations: Brains and computers represent information quite differently.

If the artificial intelligence research community is to have a challenge problem as an incentive for research, as many have called for, it behooves us to learn the principles of past successful inducement prize competitions. Those principles argue against the Turing test proper as an appropriate task, despite its appropriateness as a criterion (perhaps the only one) for attributing intelligence to a machine.

Applying Software Engineering to Agent Development

The eighteenth annual International Workshop on Principles of Diagnosis was held in Nashville, Tennessee, May 29–31, 2007. Papers presented at the workshop covered a variety of theories, principles, and computational techniques for diagnosis, monitoring, testing, reconfiguration, fault-adaptive control, and repair of complex systems. This year's workshop emphasized inter-actions and exchange of ideas and experiences between researchers and practitioners whose backgrounds included AI, control theory, systems engineering, software engineering, and related areas.

The emerging literature on combined systems is directed at domains where the prediction of human behavior is not required. Professionals concerned with human outcomes make decisions that are intuitive or analytic or some combination of both. Justifications and methodology are presented for combining analytic and intuitive agents in an expert system that supports professional decision making. The system presented demonstrates the challenges and opportunities inherent in developing and using AI-collaborative technology to solve social problems.

Automated diagnosis is an important AI problem not only for its potential practical applications but also because it exposes issues common to all automated reasoning efforts and presents real challenges to existing paradigms. Current research in this area addresses many problems, including managing and structuring probabilistic information, modeling physical systems, reasoning with defeasible assumptions, and interleaving deliberation and action. Furthermore, diagnosis programs must face these problems in contexts where scaling up to deal with cases of realistic size results in daunting combinatorics. This article presents these and other issues as discussed at the First International Workshop on Principles of Diagnosis.

A Bibliography on Hybrid Reasoning

The 1988 Workshop on Principles of Hybrid Reasoning, a one-day AAAI-sponsored workshop, was held in St. Paul, Minnesota on August 21, 1988, in conjunction with the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. This article reports on the workshop and presents some of our afterthoughts based upon prolonged discussion of the issues that arose during the workshop.

This bibliography was originally compliled for and distributed at the 1988 Workshop on Principles of Hybrid Reasoning. This bibliography was originally compliled for and distributed at the 1988 Workshop on Principles of Hybrid Reasoning.