The Cognition and Affect Project
(Additional details)

We are investigating principles for designing or explaining architectures for "whole" intelligent agents, combining many kinds of functionality, whether natural or artificial.

Multiple approaches to mind

Much of the work is theoretical: informed by cross-disciplinary themes from philosophy, AI, psychology, ethology, neuroscience and biology. For example

• Philosophical techniques help us detect, analyse, and hopefully remove or reduce conceptual confusions.
• AI research, including robotics extends our ideas about varieties of mechanisms, varieties of forms of information, varieties of non-obvious design problems needing to be solved, reasons why specific mechanisms have proved to be inadequate, and why some work on particular tasks.
• Psychology, including developmental and clinical psychology, provides a wealth of information about what humans are and can do, and a multitude of examples of failed explanations.
• Ethology extends this with information about other animals, some like humans, but most very different.
• Neuroscience helps to identify possible low level mechanisms that can account for some of the higher level functionality, and helps us to identify crucial questions that neuroscience cannot answer because its conceptual tools are inappropriate.
• Biology provides information about the huge variety of organisms and the niches they inhabit, the huge variety of sub-organism mechanisms that are required for individual survival, for development and for reproduction. Evolutionary biology may provide constraints on theories about how minds evolved, and may be informed by theories concerning possible forms of information processing mechanisms and architectures.

TOPICS WE STUDY

• Philosophical foundations of computing and AI
• Architectures for intelligent agents of various sorts (natural and artificial)
• Emotions, moods, attitudes, and other affective states and processes
  (E.g. motives, moods, desires, preferences, pains, pleasures, attitudes, ec.)
• Computers and emotions, synthetic agents and emotions. Deep and shallow models.
• What representations are, and how many varieties there are
• Architectures for human-like vision systems: multi-layered visual perception and the perception of affordances.
• Diagrammatic/spatial reasoning and how these relate to visual perception.
• Consciousness - what it is and isn't, and how various types might have evolved (consciousness in humans, in other animals, and in machines)
• Evolution and Co-evolution
  (Evolution via concurrent interacting trajectories in "design space" and "niche space": a non-mystical version of Gaia? Co-evolution of different parts of the same architecture, e.g. perceptual modules that serve the needs of higher level central modules co-evolved with the central modules. Likewise high level action modules.)
• Evolvable architectures for human-like minds. (The evolutionary history of an architecture has implications for what is in the architecture.)
• Exploring neighbourhoods in design space and niche space (including collaboration with Matthias Scheutz at the University of Notre Dame ).
• Tools for exploring alternative designs for agent architectures, tools for Artificial Intelligence
  Including The Free Poplog Web site and The SimAgent toolkit.
• The use of those tools in education: e.g. teaching students to think about how complex systems work by designing testing, debugging and documenting working systems.
• Philosophy of mind
• Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence
• Philosophy of Cognitive Science
• Ontology
• The nature of causation and whether events in virtual machines can be real causes
  (Including "downward" causation")
• Philosophy of Computation
  E.g. the nature of virtual machines, and how the implementation of virtual machines in physical machines is related to the philosopher's notion of supervenience of minds on matter.
• Emergence of various kinds
• The development of different attachment patterns in infants (PhD work by Dean Petters).
• Design of self-aware intrusion-resistant systems (work by Catriona Kennedy).
• Adding intelligence to synthetic game agents (PhD work by Nick Hawes)
• What do intelligent agents need to understand about different kinds of stuff in the environment and how can they learn about it
  • http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/talks/#talk68
    Ontologies for baby animals and robots -- From "baby stuff" to the world of adult science:
    Developmental AI from a Kantian viewpoint.
  • PhD research by Verónica Esther Arriola Ríos (Vero)
  
  .....

  And other topics discussed in The CogAff Presentations and The CogAff paper repository.

  Since September 2004 this work has been substantially extended by the EC-Funded CoSy Project Cognitive Systems for Cognitive Assistants an attempt to understand how to design and build a working robot which combines a wide range of capabilities normally investigated separately, including perception, learning, reasoning, planning, communicating, and self-understanding.

Science as well as engineering

We believe that understanding the broader class of designs for minds is essential for understanding the special features of human minds. To understand something you need to understand not only what it is, but also in which respects it might have been different, and what differences those differences would have made.

A related activity: the UK Computing Research Committee's 'Grand Challenges' discussion includes a draft proposal for a grand challenge on 'Architecture of Brain and Mind'

Practical activities

To help with this practical work we have designed and implemented a sophisticated, and unusually flexible toolkit for implementing agents composed of multiple interacting mechanisms performing different tasks concurrently, e.g. perception, reasoning, learning, modifying motives, producing emotions, making plans, executing plans, etc. This toolkit is freely available on the Web with full source code, here: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/packages/simagent.html

Initially our simulated agents inhabit only simple simulated worlds, though our work is largely inspired by much of what is known about real animals (especially humans) in real physical and social environments.

We shall gradually make the simulations more and more complex as our understanding and our resources grow, and as our theories develop so as to explain an increasingly wide range of phenomena in increasingly rich detail.

We also hope to test the ideas in real robots, in particular in the EU-funded CoSy project

Some mpeg movies showing simple demos are available here.

Potential applications

The work may also achieve the practical goal of helping us understand better how people work, how they learn, how they go wrong, etc. which could have profound implications for education and therapy, and generally improving the quality of life.

In particular our survey of various kinds of architectures and how they might have evolved should shed light on problems of controlling attention in resource-limited agents (natural or artificial), and explain how various kinds of emotional states are possible. We have shown how at least three different sorts of emotions (primary emotions, secondary emotions and tertiary emotions) can arise in agents with the sorts of layered architectures we have been studying. Further, more detailed, architecture-based classifications of affective states will follow from an analysis of the states and processes supported by our hypothesised architectures.

These emotional capabilities are shared to varying degrees with other animals, depending on their information processing architectures.

More detailed project overview

Some previous contributors and collaborators.

There is a growing collection of slide presentations in this directory: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/talks/

Gerd Ruebenstrunk has written a survey entitled Emotional Computers available in German and English which includes an overview of much of our work (up to 1988).

Related work by Marvin Minsky and Push Singh

Push Singh's PhD thesis is also very closely related. It is available in two formats:

• PDF
• HTML
  EM-ONE: An Architecture for Reflective Commonsense Thinking
  by Push Singh
  June 2005

Philosophical connections

Our work has many connections with work in philosophy of mind and other areas of philosophy, going back thousands of years.

One aspect of the philosophical work is attempting to understand the similarities and differences between various kinds of machines:

1. machines which transform and use force and energy,
2. machines which reorganise matter (at microscopic or macroscopic scales)
3. machines which process information, i.e. acquire, transform, store, interpret, search for, or transmit information about themselves or other things, including non-existent things!

Collaboration is always welcome, as is critical comment.

FURTHER INFORMATION

Work in Birmingham on the EC-Funded project CoSy: Cognitive Systems for Cognitive Assistants started in September 2004. See

• Overview
• PlayMate Scenario

The Leverhulme-funded project on Evolvable virtual information processing architectures for human-like minds, lasted from October 1999 to June 2003. See this web site: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/lev/

Project papers, PhD theses, seminar slides, etc. can be found in http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/

The Sim_agent toolkit, is available free of charge with full system sources in the Free Poplog directory.

For more information about the project contact Aaron Sloman (address below).

This file is maintained by Aaron Sloman, and designed to be lynx-friendly, and viewable with any browser.
Last updated: 11 May 2009
Email A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk