A candidate framework for integration of theoretical, modeling and experimental approaches to understanding emotional intelligence is described. The framework includes three elements of a new kind that enable representation of emotional cognition: an emotional state, an appraisal, and a moral schema. These elements are integrated with the weak semantic cognitive map representing the values of emotional appraisals. The framework is tested on interpretation of results obtained in two new experimental paradigms that reveal general features of human emotional cognition, such as the emergence of subjectively perceived persistent roles of individual virtual actors.

For developers of artificial intelligence, the goal does not get much more grandiose than successfully creating a machine capable of feeling "real emotion". And according to Moscow-based Professor Alexei Samsonovich, Russia is on the verge of doing just that. Samsonovich recently announced that he expects a breakthrough in the next several years which will see the rise of "free thinking" machines capable of understanding human emotions, as well as feeling their own emotions. The human brain is devastatingly complex and machines are currently not capable of expressing what we would consider to be "human emotion". The announcement hints at robots ultimately being able to understand narratives of thinking, as well as being developed enough to foster their own narratives.

Furby and Clippy were early forms; driverless cars and Facebook's chatbots pick up the mantle today. But if AI is to continue its evolution, it'll have to get more convincingly human. Right now, its capacity for emotional depth is seriously lacking. At a cognitive architectures conference in New York last week, Alexei Samsonovich, a professor in the Cybernetics Department at the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute, proposed a multi-part test. It would involve a human and a machine interacting, but under the guise of avatars in a virtual world.

AI has been making great strides in the past few years, beating humans at our own game, as well as augmenting and even replacing human controlled systems. However, some are still not impressed with these developments and feel more should be done. Such is the view of Professor Alexi Samsonovich, who announced that Russia "is on the verge" of a major AI milestone--robots that can feel human emotion! The announcement was made during the 2016 Annual International Conference on Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures (BICA) in New York City. Specifically, Samsonovich pointed to free thinking machines capable of feeling and understanding human emotions, understanding narratives and thinking in those narratives, as well as being capable to actively learn on their own.

Researchers propose an emotion test for artificially intelligent systems. Furby and Clippy were early forms; driverless cars and Facebook's chatbots pick up the mantle today. But if AI is to continue its evolution, it'll have to get more convincingly human. Right now, its capacity for emotional depth is seriously lacking. At a cognitive architectures conference in New York last week, Alexei Samsonovich, a professor in the Cybernetics Department at the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute, proposed a multi-part test.

At an artificial intelligence conference in New York City last week, Professor Alexi Samsonovich from the Moscow-based National Research Nuclear University (MEPhl) Cybernetics Department told Sputnik News, "We are on the verge of a major breakthrough" in AI. In the past six months, we've seen AI master the board game Go, write a short film script, and infiltrate Snapchat filters. Each of these achievements is impressive in its own right. Together, they show just how quickly AI is advancing. But what was this breakthrough Samsonovich hinted at in NYC? Digital Trends reached out to him to find out.

Samsonovich made the comments while attending the 2016 Annual International Conference on Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures (BICA) in New York City, which takes place from July 16-19. The conference was sponsored by MEPhl and attracted more than 200 participants. "We are on the verge of a major breakthrough that was discussed since the fifties of the previous century," Samsonovich said on Tuesday. The breakthrough, according to Samsonovich, is the creation of free thinking machines capable of feeling and understanding human emotions, understanding narratives and thinking in those narratives, as well as being capable to actively learn on their own. "Those are the three key capabilities in my view that will determine the breakthrough," Samsonovich said, adding that progress is expected to be made in "several years."

Artificial intelligence (AI) has made a few spectacular-sounding headlines this year, with various organizations showing off their own digital creation's cognitive capabilities. These tend to relate to "logical" intelligence, dealing with mathematics, rationality, and decision-making. However, just this month, a team of researchers from the National Research Nuclear University Moscow Engineering Physics Institute (NRNU MEPhI) has announced that they are developing an AI that is able to have both narrative and emotional intellect. If this so-called "Virtual Actor" (VA) is able to understand human emotions, it will buck the trend in the types of AIs emerging from other research teams across the world. Google's DeepDream, for example, is a truly surreal convoluted neural network that can "think" of hallucinogenic images.

Emotional intelligence is the key for acceptance of intelligent agents by humans as equal partners, e.g., in ad hoc teams. At the same time, its existing implementations in intelligent agents are mostly limited to basic affects. Currently, there is no consensus in the understanding of complex and social emotions at the level of functional and computational models. The approach of this work is based on the mental state formalism, originally developed as a part of the cognitive architecture GMU BICA and recently extended to include affective building blocks (A.V. Samsonovich, AAAI Technical Report WS-12-06: 109-116, 2012). In the present work, complex social emotions like humor, jealousy, compassion, shame, pride, etc. are identified as emergent patterns of appraisals represented by schemas, that capture the cognitive nature of these emotions and enable their modeling. A general model of complex emotions and emotional relationships is constructed that can be validated by simulations of emotionally biased interactions and emergent relationships in small groups of agents. The framework will be useful in cognitive architectures for designing human-like-intelligent social agents possessing a sense of humor and other human-like emotionally intelligent capabilities.

A general consensus on representation of emotions and feelings in cognitive architectures is currently missing; yet artificial emotional intelligence is vital for the integration of future robots into the human society. This work introduces one possible approach to representation and processing of emotional mental states and attitudes, that allows for implementation of control of agent behavior by emotions as well as for recognition of emotional motivations in another agent's behavior. One particular advantage of this approach is that it allows for representation and processing of complex/social emotional attitudes, like shame, jealousy, resentment, or humor. The proposed validation of the approach is based on simulation of the emergence of emotional relationships in a small group of agents in a virtual environment.