There are also links in the table of contents to projects that overlap with CogAff, including, since 2004, collaborative projects in Cognitive Robotics (CoSy 2004-2008, CogX 2008-2012).
In addition to published and unpublished papers and technical reports, the web site also includes a collection of talks given over many years.
The project was begun by
Aaron Sloman
and
Glyn
Humphreys (psychology)
in 1991.
It is one of the oldest groupings in
the School of Computer
Science,
though not as old as
When the work began in 1991 it was a continuation of work begun in the 1960s at The University of Sussex, and continued in the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences (COGS).
Some of the earliest work was reported in this book (now online):
The Computer Revolution in Philosophy: Philosophy, science and models of mind (1978 -- with notes added since 2002).After AS moved to Birmingham, the work was partly funded by a grant to Sloman and Humphreys, from the UK Joint Council Initiative (JCI), which paid for equipment and a studentship.
Available as PDF and HTML. Also at ASSC repository
The first PhD thesis completed in the project was by Luc Beaudoin (funded by a Canadian research council). It is listed here along with others. Among other things, it offered a new, unusually detailed analysis of aspects of motives that can change over time, and introduced the important distinction between deliberative mechanisms (which can represent, explore, hypothesise, plan and select possible situations, processes and future actions) and meta-management mechanisms which can can monitor, and to some extent control internal processes (including deliberative processes). The ideas are explained in more detail here. Similar work elsewhere uses labels such as "reflective", "metacognitive", though often with different emphases.
Later extensions arose from funding by DERA which enabled Brian Logan to work here for several years, followed by a project funded by The Leverhulme Trust on Evolvable virtual information processing architectures for human-like minds, originally set up with Brian Logan, which then paid for Matthias Scheutz to work here for 13 months (2000-2001), followed by Ron Chrisley (2001-2003).
From 2004 related work was funded by the EU, in two projects on cognitive robotics CoSy and CogX.
Much of this work is now done as part of the Intelligent Robotics research laboratory (led by Jeremy Wyatt) at Birmingham.
In 2004,
Jackie
Chappell,
arrived in the School of Biosciences, and we began work
on extending the biologists' ideas about
"Altricial" and "Precocial" species
to robots
and investigating
nature-nurture tradeoffs in
animals.
Our theoretical research
on animal cognition then expanded e.g. to include work on
varieties of causation (Humean and Kantian) in animals and
machines.
From 2008 this was further expanded to include studies of cognition
in orangutans, in collaboration with
Susannah
Thorpe,
also in
Biosciences.
CogAff is really a loose, informal, collection of sub-projects, most of them unfunded at any time,
including
research on architectures, forms of representation and mechanisms
occurring in humans,
other animals, and human-like machines.
A more detailed list of topics covered can be found here.
Analysing such architectures, and the mental states and processes they can support, allows us
to investigate, for instance, whether consciousness or the ability to have emotional states is an
accident of animal evolution or a direct evolutionary consequence of biological requirements or
a side-effect of things meeting other
requirements and constraints.
One of the main outcomes of this research was development of the CogAff schema (explained briefly here) for characterising a wide range of types of possible architecture in natural and artificial systems (in contrast with most researchers on cognitive architectures who promote a particular architecture).
A special case (or subclass) of CogAff is the H-CogAff (Human-Cogaff) architectures, which is still currently too difficult to implement, though various subsets have been implemented by researchers here and elsewhere. The next section of this web site gives an overview of CogAff and H-CogAff.
This Schema classifies requirements for the major components of an architecture into nine broad categories on a 3x3 grid.
This is just a first crude sub-division, requiring more detailed analysis and further decomposition of cases.
-----covering many different types of architecture, natural and artificial, depicted rather
-----That generic schema includes an important sub-class of architectures that
A rather complex special case is the H-CogAff architecture, which we suggest
provides a very high level "birds-eye view" of the architecture of a typical
(adult) human
mind, depicted crudely here (as a first approximation):
-----
which includes concurrently active sub-architectures that evolved at
different times
in our evolutionary history, in addition to
sub-architectures that grow themselves
during
individual development (as discussed in
this paper
by Chappell and
Sloman.)
A paper summarising the ideas behind the CogAff schema and the
H-CogAff archicture
is this
2003
progress report on the Cogaff project.
Further details are provided in other papers, including for example this polemical piece:
Some Requirements for Human-like Robots: Why the recent over-emphasis on embodiment has held up progress (2008).
Now published in
Creating Brain-like Intelligence,
Eds. B. Sendhoff, E. Koerner, O. Sporns and H. Ritter and K. Doya,
Springer-Verlag, 2009 Berlin,
http://rapidshare.com/files/209786694/Creating_Brain-Like_Intelligence.zip
An incomplete survey of types of architecture that include a
"deliberative layer" can be
found in
Requirements for a Fully Deliberative Architecture.
Some systems described as "deliberative" include only what we call "proto-deliberative" mechanisms.
Most of the hypothesised architectures are still too difficult to implement
though some of the simpler ones have been implemented using
the SimAgent toolkit,
and demonstrated
here.
More complex examples were developed within the EU-funded
CoSy robot
project (2004-2008),
and are being extended in its sequel
the CogX robot project
(2004-2012).
In 1998 Gerd Ruebenstrunk presented some of our ideas for German readers in his diploma thesis in psychology on "Emotional Computers" (Bielefeld University, 1998). His 2004 presentation on emotions, at a workshop on "Affective Systems" (in English) is here.
NEWS: AUDIO BROADCAST ONLINE:
Audio discussion
broadcast on Deutschlandradio
on 'Emotional Computers' online
(mostly in German), chaired by
Maximilian Schönherr.
The audio link is on the right, under 'AUDIO ON DEMAND'. Click on
'Emotionale Agenten'.
Audio interview on grand challenge (December 2004)
NEWS: RESEARCH GRAND CHALLENGE:
In 2002, the UK Computing Research Committee (UKCRC) initiated a
discussion of research grand challenges. One of these is Grand Challenge
5:
'Architecture of Brain and Mind' For more information see
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/gc/
NEWS: OUR SOFTWARE TOOLS ARE AVAILABLE FREE OF CHARGE/OPEN
SOURCE
at
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/freepoplog.html
Including
The SimAgent Toolkit
and some
demonstration
movies.
There are now far more papers in the Cogaff directory than were originally envisaged when this scheme started. When I find time I shall try to organise grouping by topic, though that will not be easy because of the complex overlaps of topic.
Browsers for the Postscript and PDF formats used here are freely available. See http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/browsers.html
and search here:
tertiary emotions
meta-management
diagrams
vision architecture
artificial intelligence toolkit
information-processing
Kantian Humean causation
meta-requirements eucognition
free-will
what is AI?
"what is information?"
Grand challenge
research roadmap
education programming AI
qualia
Marvin Minsky
-----------------------------------matter energy information
"possible minds"
"design space" "niche space"
evolution altricial precocial
biology
emotions "cluster concepts"
emotions intelligence
emotions architectures
virtual machines
Turing irrelevance
CoSy Playmate
CoSy robot
functions of vision
consciousness
creativity machines
John McCarthy
-----------------------------------
Some documents are in html, latex or plain ascii text. Most of the postscript files are duplicated in PDF format.
PDF versions of files available only postscript can be provided on request. Email A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk requesting conversion of a paper you cannot read.
Browsers for these formats are freely available. See http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/browsers.html
NOTE (16 Jun 1998):
Files which were previously in form xxx.Z are now in the form xxx.gz
The toolkit runs in Poplog, which used to be an expensive commercial
product, but is also now available free of charge with full system
sources, at
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/freepoplog.html
OR
ftp://ftp.cs.bham.ac.uk/pub/dist/poplog/freepoplog.html
Information about the symposium, including abstracts and full papers can be found here http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/dam00
A book of papers related to the workshop was edited by Darryl
Davis and published in 2004
Visions of Mind: Architectures for Cognition and
Affect.
IGI Publishing
Please read that file information BEFORE writing to individuals asking
for advice or information.
Please note: I do not deal with student admissions.
This file is maintained by Aaron Sloman, and designed to be lynx-friendly, and viewable with any browser.
Email A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk
