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Recent Advances in Cognitive Systems
Roland Piquepaille writes "ERCIM News is a quarterly publication from the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics. The April 2003 issue is dedicated to cognitive systems. It contains no less than 21 articles which are all available online. In this column, you'll find a summary of the introduction and what are the possible applications of these cognitive systems. There's also a picture of the cover, a little robot with a very nice looking blue wig. And in A Gallery of Cognitive Systems, you'll find a selection of stories, including links, abstracts and illustrations (the whole page weighs 217 KB). There are very good pictures of autonomous soccer robots, swarm bots, cognitive vision systems, and more."
Noun ; 1. The current scientist scam, which has replaced the older artificial intelligence scam with its more robust resistance to criticism and even more byzantine theories.
Its nice to see robotoics coming along and finally making good on all the sci-fi book
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
When I'm 85, I'm going to have a nice little holographic butler keeping track of my appointments and stuff like that... Never tiring, never forgetting.
;)
When you're that old I think it's your right to be lazy... right?
.: Max Romantschuk
The Chiefs could have picked any of those drones instead of Larry Johnson.
*sigh*
But doing so doesn't relieve you of your responsibility to think too.
I have been pwned because my
I blog...therefore I is.
Just another day in Paradise
The Annals of Improbable Research, the humor magazine for scientists, once had an article entitled "Advances in Artificial Intelligence". After the title and author affiliations, the page was appropriately completely blank...
The great thing about the recent development in so-called cognitive systems is that they start to address more real problems. The time of toy problems is over. It is not enough to just follow a line. Only the challenge from the real world can make algorithms in any way "clever" or meaningful.
This is why I find it truly inspiring that so much research is going into these systems these days.
Sadly however most of neuroscience these days is still far from these questions. Most electrophysiologists that for example study the visual system show it trivial stimuli such as bars or gratings. In some sense a system can only show its capability when the stimuli are rich enough.
Nevertheless there is clearly a move these days towards larger more interesting problems even in neuroscience. We should be inspired by the works of the roboticists.
Googlefight "Slashdot Troll" against "BSD is dying" 303:229. BSD thus cant die.
Actually, I'd say that not very many are doing that.
The goal of all the cognitive scientists I've met is to make machines think, just as with A.I. In fact, I've always heard, and was told in my AI class, that A.I. is a branch of cognitive science.
However, there are many approaches to machine thinking that are not considered part of A.I.:
neural networks, SVMs, computer vision (signal interpretation), modeling.
So what does A.I. cover then? Well, it's not exactly well defined. If you read A.I. textbooks, you'll find the full of lots of different things. Some would go so far as to even include those things I mentioned that aren't normally considered part of A.I. However, in general, I would say that A.I. is the field that is concerned with
1) Solving the search problem (searching for a solution in a large set of possibilities)
2) Doing it with heuristics.
I'd like to take a moment to note that a famous computer vision paper came out in the 80's that documented a method called Marr-Hildreth, which was for finding edges in images. They created it by using the same technique that eyes use (laplacian of a Gaussian for edge detection - they studied cats to find this out).
A few years later someone improved upon it by throwing out the model completely and NOT doing it the way that people do (Canny).
Cognitive scientists are usually more concerned with getting the machines to do what we want than they are with modeling human thinking techniques.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
to detect dupes!
Having a system combine both symbolic logic systems and sensory systems is mentioned in the article as a major focus of research today, but I wonder why this has been split so specifically...maybe someone can help me to understand.
The point at which an understanding of body position is integrated with an overall structure of behavior leading towards a goal seems a mirage, since this isn't necessarily the way animal systems work. The best recreation of natures flexibility in "simple" systems that I've heard of comes from Mark Tilden's analog systems that are controled by tight-loops of feedback that very closely model reflex circuits, but that are capable of recovering from intense deformations of "perfect positioning".
Now, obivously, reflex systems can only go so far, when you have a bot that you want to decide path across a room, there has to be a symbolic understanding of its environment. But it seems to me, from my (albeit very limited) understanding of insect / lower-animal inteligence, that most insects don't actually work up a full symbolic understanding of their surroundings, they just have some sort of sense of direction towards a goal (think moths to light) and then they start the reflex circuits firing to move towards it. I can understand having an end goal of having a full cognitive system comparable to human understanding of the world, but it seems like people might be overshooting the process a bit. We need a greater understanding of the simple systems before we can hope to frog-leap to the big stuff.
To dispute my own point though, I feel its fair to say that the "simple" systems of the animal brain are already currently being modeled to the point that prosthesis for the brain might just be within reach. The success of an artificial hipocampus will prove that modeling the brain isn't necessarily understanding the brain, but it might be easier to learn the systems from our artificial models than the real ones.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The ultimate goal of the RoboCup project is by 2050, develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world champion team in soccer
,-}
Now THAT's a goal.
Maybe we'll see humanoid robot referees in sports. That should stop any dissent from the players
Player: C'mon ref, that was never in a million years a f**king penalty !!
Ref: You have 3 seconds to comply..
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
Johnny five is alive!
This is my sig, there are many like it, but this one is mine...
A more detailed summary is available here and this is the project web site.
Compared to proprietary systems such as Ai's HAL, Meaningful Machines Knowledge Engine, and Lobal Technologies LAD, EBLA is the only system to incorporate grounded/perceptual understanding of language.
While this is all very interesting and becoming more practical for everyday use, we don't hear enough about the stuff that's related but not quite bleeding edge. We know there are people trying to create intelligent systems such as for language understanding and intelligent web searching, but it seems we don't hear much about them. I'm wondering if it's because most of that is being done within corporations while much of this bleeding edge research is done by universities.
Developers: We can use your help.
I realise I missed the smiley off the end.
:-)
Here it is
I think this is a little euro-centric, concentrating on systems that were developed at North American schools long ago...
""My experience with cogsci is that it's really about understanding thought, not about making machines. I think it really depends on where you are. If you're at MIT, it's probably machines."" ahem. not at all. usuing MIT as an example the dept of Brain and Cognitive Sciences is more concerned with human cognition. granted there are some poeple who are more in the AI area, but many are not. (i was one of them) most schools who have an offical cognitive science dept or program mostly have cogntiive psychologist or cognitive neuroscienctist in it. (see UCSD, UC-Berkeley, MIT, Urochester) The bottom line is that in my 5 or so years as a cognitive scientist i can tell you that there is a VERY wide range of type of reseachers to claim to be cognitive scientist. They all work on the same problem but from a different angle. The problem being intelligence/thought. be it looking at human thought, or trying to create something like it. Cognitive scientist come from areas such as neuroscience, AI, Linguistics, psychology, ect.
he whole page weighs 217 KB
...it doesn't weigh shit. Neither does it really occupy any space, in the truest sense of the word. It's virtual.
#;^)
I was disappointed by the 5 articles I read and stopped reading. It basically reads like a catalog of the projects and techno-terms that are being performed with very little actual content.
Basically each one boiled down to: our lab does the XYZAB project and we're studying this system.
It's sad to see that one of the more thought-provoking "lasting impact" stories on the site has such low traffic...
i don't see what this has to do with mathematics. the algorithms are all heuristic. my experience is that such things tend to not work outside a narrowly defined environment. i think it is ashame that good engineering work in robotics gets ignored because it doesn't look to the public as sexy as this stuff. like rigid body contact - it's really hard to have a robot pick something up. now there is actual mathematics.
nt
[ed. note: in the following text, former FreeBSD developer Mike Smith gives his reasons for abandoning FreeBSD]
When I stood for election to the FreeBSD core team nearly two years ago, many of you will recall that it was after a long series of debates during which I maintained that too much organisation, too many rules and too much formality would be a bad thing for the project.
Today, as I read the latest discussions on the future of the FreeBSD project, I see the same problem; a few new faces and many of the old going over the same tired arguments and suggesting variations on the same worthless schemes. Frankly I'm sick of it.
FreeBSD used to be fun. It used to be about doing things the right way. It used to be something that you could sink your teeth into when the mundane chores of programming for a living got you down. It was something cool and exciting; a way to spend your spare time on an endeavour you loved that was at the same time wholesome and worthwhile.
It's not anymore. It's about bylaws and committees and reports and milestones, telling others what to do and doing what you're told. It's about who can rant the longest or shout the loudest or mislead the most people into a bloc in order to legitimise doing what they think is best. Individuals notwithstanding, the project as a whole has lost track of where it's going, and has instead become obsessed with process and mechanics.
So I'm leaving core. I don't want to feel like I should be "doing something" about a project that has lost interest in having something done for it. I don't have the energy to fight what has clearly become a losing battle; I have a life to live and a job to keep, and I won't achieve any of the goals I personally consider worthwhile if I remain obligated to care for the project.
Discussion
I'm sure that I've offended some people already; I'm sure that by the time I'm done here, I'll have offended more. If you feel a need to play to the crowd in your replies rather than make a sincere effort to address the problems I'm discussing here, please do us the courtesy of playing your politics openly.
From a technical perspective, the project faces a set of challenges that significantly outstrips our ability to deliver. Some of the resources that we need to address these challenges are tied up in the fruitless metadiscussions that have raged since we made the mistake of electing officers. Others have left in disgust, or been driven out by the culture of abuse and distraction that has grown up since then. More may well remain available to recruitment, but while the project is busy infighting our chances for successful outreach are sorely diminished.
There's no simple solution to this. For the project to move forward, one or the other of the warring philosophies must win out; either the project returns to its laid-back roots and gets on with the work, or it transforms into a super-organised engineering project and executes a brilliant plan to deliver what, ultimately, we all know we want.
Whatever path is chosen, whatever balance is struck, the choosing and the striking are the important parts. The current indecision and endless conflict are incompatible with any sort of progress.
Trying to dissect the above is far beyond the scope of any parting shot, no matter how distended. All I can really ask of you all is to let go of the minutiae for a moment and take a look at the big picture. What is the ultimate goal here? How can we get there with as little overhead as possible? How would you like to be treated by your fellow travellers?
Shouts
To the Slashdot "BSD is dying" crowd - big deal. Death is part of the cycle; take a look at your soft, pallid bodies and consider that right this very moment, parts of you are dying. See? It's not so bad.
To the bulk of the FreeBSD committerbase and the developer community at large - keep your eyes on the real goals. It'
But don't get your hopes up - when they attempted to upgrade JonKatz with an expanded repertoire of once-wired-now-tired cliches, the result was disastrous, and the unit had to be retired. Some upgrades are simply beyond our current technology...
All of which is a secondary result of another case of 80s hype. Declarative languages, such as SQL, were sold as "fourth generation" because they were supposed to make procedural languages ("third generation languages") obsolete. Which didn't happen of course. Declarative programming ended up supplementing older languages, not replacing them.
After a while the original meaning was forgotten. So now people call languages "4GLs" etc. to emphasize some vague claim that they're more advanced. Or because of a vague notion that 4GL has something to do with database programming. These are terms we should just stop using.
Some people had a better idea than others, though. I don't think much fundamental has changed in terms of our general understanding of what does and doesn't constitute intelligence, since at least about the late '70s, but there've still been questionable AI-related claims in that timeframe.
And personally, as far as I can see, most of the much vaunted human "intelligence" is "just dicking around with heuristics".
Those are just the bits that aren't real AI... ;o)
AI has yet to even define itself, and hence, is troubled by the most fundamental disagreements about just exactly what its questions are, leaving doubt about whether the answers could even be found given the state of the art.
All I ever hear about when folks brag about "advances in AI" are things like some new algorithm which can interpret some form of input which it previously could not, or new theories of machine learning, etc.
No one yet has effectively defined the mechanics which make up "the mind". Folks still argue about whether its even important.
All I want to see is some sort of AI where glorified robotics engineers do not get labeled as "AI research scientists". Classify, and move on. I want to see advances in cognitive neuroscience! Not vague references to AI that make me click the link and be dissapointed.
Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance. God, how I love it. - Gen. George Patton