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."

Comments

Real world problems and neuroscience

[Neuronerd]

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.

Re:Real world problems and neuroscience

[TomorrowPlusX]

Sadly however most of neuroscience these days is still far from these questions.

This is interesting to me, for several reasons. I'm working on robotics in my free time, mainly not cognitive stuff but lower level autonomous muscular control and feedback loop stuff. But anyway, my girlfriend's studying neuroscience and she, like many (too many) of her peers, finds absolutely NOTHING interesting in cognitive research.

All they care about is the mechanics (which is important) but I think they consider cognition to be a peculiar but unimportant side effect of the rest of the complex process.

So, as a fellow who's spent years writing code to try to do intelligent stuff, and more recently robots to carry these actions out, it's somewhat frustrating to be in a bar with a bunch of neuroscientists and hear them dismiss cognition as irrelevant.

Not all cognitive scientists do that.

[fireboy1919]

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.

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