With hard work
and a little bit of luck we can make the age-old dream
of intelligent human-like machines come true in our lifetime.
And as Hans Moravec once pointed out, luck depends on
having enough lottery tickets.
So let's get started!
Cognitive Architecture & Sentient
Systems
How can a thinking mind
be produced through interactions between a complex arrangement
of functions? Natural intelligence, as observed in humans
and animals, is the result of multiple systems and subsystems,
implementing a complex pattern of information flow and controlled
interaction. I study how the architectural aspects of a thinkning
mind can be implemented
in an artificial substrate. The aim is to produce an artificial
general intelligence.
| Have you ever seen a child take apart a favorite
toy? Did you then see the little one cry after realizing
he could not put all the pieces back together again?
Well, here is a secret that never makes the headlines:
We have taken apart the universe and have no idea how
to put it back together. After spending trillions of
research dollars to dissasemble nature in the last century,
we are just now acknowledging that we have no clue
how to continue - except to take it apart further.
— Albert-Lásló Barbasi
Linked - The New Science of Networks |
Con - struct
- ionist A.I.: Artificially intelligent
manmade system built by hand; learning restricted
to combining predefined situations and tasks, from
detailed specifications provided by a human programmer.
While the system may gain in its performance in some
limited domain, the domain itself is decided and
defined by the programmer.
Con - struct - ivist A.I.:
Self-constructive artificial intelligence
system with general knowledge acquisition
skills. Systems capable of architectural self-modification
and self-directed growth; develop from
a seed specification; capable of learning to perceive
and act in a wide range of novel situations
and domains and learning to perform a number of
different tasks. |
I try to build larger,
more integrated and complete systems than achieved to date,
because I find it unlikely that mind appears from a simple
principle — rather, I think that the mind is the result
of a huge amount of interacting components, hooked up in
a very complex way according to largely unknown principles.
My approach follows two main traditions in systems thinking.
On the one hand is a rather familiar modular decomposition
from cognitive science and software development. Modularization
(object-orientation being one expression) is the most highly
advanced method at present to construct complex systems - constructionist
A.I. Unfortunately this
method has severe limitations. As the proponents of the holistic
systems approach have pointed out (e.g. Varela, Maturana,
Simon) many complex systems have the elusive property that
local interactions between their parts are not sufficient
to explain, understand or predict the operation of the whole
system of which they are part. Software methodologies employing
traditional modular decomposition will not be sufficient
to allow us to construct such systems in the lab.
If we are ever to see generally intelligent
artificial systems we must
look towards methodologies that more directly allow us to
model and study complex phenomena, calling for an investigation
of the principles of self-organization and meta-control.
In short, we must employ methods that allow the system to
develop on its own, through self-constructive principles.
This is constructivist
A.I. This
topic is the subject of my 2009
AAAI Fall Symposium on Biologically-Inspired Cognitive
Architectures keynote speech, as well as the subject
of the HUMANOBS
Workshop From Constructionist to Constructivist AI held
in the fall of 2011, and one of the main topics of our
upcoming Summer
School on Constructivist AI and Artificial General Intelligence.
Selected
Projects
A.I. research on applying principles of
self-organization in the development, implementation or construction
of A.I. systems is called
constructivist A.I. As it is becoming clear
that the manual construction process employed in most of
software development wil not be sufficient to construct the
kinds of complex architectures that we require for general
intelligence, our focus must shift towards using techniques
that allow systems to acquire their own knowledge and grow
on their own. Without such principles in hand it is unlikely
that we will we see systems with architecture-wide
integration of learning, attention, analogy making and system
growth. Our recently-awarded HUMANOBS project
grant from the EU will enable us to take notable steps in
this direction.
Constructivist Papers
From
Constructionist to Constructivist A.I.
Self-Programming:
Operationalizing Autonomy
Achieving
Artificial General Intelligence Through Peewee Granularity
 |
 |
Constructionist
A.I. (not to be confused with constructivist A.I. - see
above) is a moniker given to the bulk of A.I. research being
performed around the world, where traditional software development
methods form the basis of the work. In this tradition we
have developed the Constructionist Design Methodology (CDM),
which eases the creation of modular, complex machines that
incorporate some aspects of a full perception-action loop.
We have used it on the HONDA
Asimo humanoid robot and Mirage
autonomus virtual agent [ watch
movie]. Mirage inhabits
an augmented reality; this complex system of integrated
heterogeneous components was designed and implemented in
as little as 2 mind-months using the CDM. We think it's directly
due to the application of CDM in the project [published
in A.I. Magazine, winter 2004]. We have also used
CDM for a live performance of the Robot
Opera in Reykjavik, 2006 [
watch movie] and 2007. One of
our main and ongoing projects using the CDM is an artificial
radio show host that can conduct a full radio program
completely autonomously, including interview listeners over
the phone.
Constructionist Papers
Cognitive
Map Architecture for Honda ASIMO
Constructionist Design Methdology for Interactive Intelligences
From Constructionist to Constructivist A.I.
MINDMAKERS.ORG.
The mission of MINDMAKERS.ORG is to further development of
large integrated artificial intelligence systems, with a strong
focus on real-time human-humanoid interaction and collaboration.
The main forum for Constructionist AI. Please consider
joining!
OpenAIR is
a routing and communication protocol based on a publish-subscribe
architecture. It is intended to be the "glue" that
allows numerous AI researchers to share code more effectively
— "AIR to share". Serving essentially as the
"post office and mail delivery system" for distributed,
multi-module systems, OpenAIR provides the foundation upon
which subsequent markup languages and semantics can be based,
for e.g. gesture recognition and generation, motor control,
computer vision, hardware-software interfacing, to name a
few.
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ru.is
