PROPOSAL -- AIIB SYMPOSIUM FOR AISB'10 The AISB 2010 Convention http://www.aisb.org.uk/convention/aisb10/AISB2010.html 29th March - 1st April 2010, De Montfort University, Leicester This is a proposal for a symposium on "AI-Inspired Biology" (AIIB) to be held as part of the AISB 2010 convention Last updated: 24 Jul 2009 The proposal has been accepted. We don't yet know on which two days the AIIB symposium will be held. A call for participation is in preparation. This web site will be updated. NOTE: Prof Margaret Boden, Sussex University Prof Nicky Clayton, Cambridge University Have both agreed to be invited speakers. A draft flyer for the workshop is here http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/aiib/aiib-sheet.pdf There will also be a symposium on Mathematical Cognition at the Convention. We hope the two symposia will complement each othe. CONTENTS -- SYMPOSIUM TITLE -- PROPOSED CHAIR(S) AND THEIR DETAILS -- DESCRIPTION -- Possible Topics (DRAFT LIST -- likely to be pruned): -- -- More specific questions: -- PROPOSED ACTIVITIES, TYPE OF SUBMISSIONS -- CASE FOR SUPPORT -- PROPOSED PARTICIPANTS/PROGRAM COMMITTEE -- SYMPOSIUM TITLE ----------------------------------------------- AI-Inspired Biology (vs Biologically-Inspired AI) -- PROPOSED CHAIR(S) AND THEIR DETAILS ---------------------------- (Please communicate with all, for the time being.) (In surname alphabetical order.) Jackie Chappell (Biology) [Chief Editor: Symposium Proceedings] Email: School of Biological Sciences, University of Birmingham http://www.ornithology.bham.ac.uk/staff/academicstaff/jackiechappell.shtml Nick Hawes (AI/Robotics) Email: School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~nah Aaron Sloman (Philosophy/AI/Robotics) Email School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs Susannah Thorpe (Biomechanicist) Email School of Biological Sciences, University of Birmingham http://www.biosciences.bham.ac.uk/About/staff_profiles_Contact.htm?ID=85 PROPOSED DURATION: Two days -- DESCRIPTION --------------------------------------------------- This is NOT a proposal for a symposium on biologically-inspired AI, e.g. NOT o attempts to mimic details of the morphology of humans or other animals, o attempts to apply theories about how neural mechanisms work or how evolutionary mechanisms work, to solve engineering problems. o attempts to develop mechanisms inspired by social behaviours of organisms, including swarming, flocking, use of pheromone trails, etc. o attempts to understand the problems solved by biological evolution in order to clarify goals and requirements for AI/Robotics. INSTEAD, the symposium is concerned with influences in the opposite direction: from AI/Robotics to biology, i.e. using ideas from Computing and AI to help drive research on various aspects of natural cognition, e.g. in birds, primates, octopuses and humans, as well as research on aspects of evolution, general features of neural mechanisms, and social behaviours of various kinds. (This could earlier have been Biologically-inspired AI.) Examples of the past impact on biology from technology include using ideas developed for asdic and radar to explain whale and bat echolocation, and using the science behind infrared heat sensing devices to explain viper pits. (Thanks to Richard Byrne for the examples.) This symposium will emphasise the roles of AI in *contributing* to research on natural cognition, as opposed to research that attempts to *imitate* or *apply* aspects of how organisms work (e.g. their morphology, their neural mechanisms, their information processing architectures, their development, etc.) to solve engineering problems. -- Possible Topics (DRAFT LIST): ----------- Examples of AI-Inspired Biology suitable for this symposium could include: o Investigating aspects of the environment that are challenging for current robots, and using the analysis of those challenges to inspire more detailed research on how animals of various sorts overcome the challenges. o Taking solutions that have been developed in engineering contexts and investigating whether they can provide models for how natural systems work. o Taking models/theories that have been developed by biologists, psychologists, etc. and analysing gaps and problems that emerge when attempts are used to derive designs for working systems, possibly leading to revisions of the original theories. o Using design-based analyses of natural behaviours to suggest new specific theories about detailed requirements that could have driven evolutionary and developmental processes, and working out implications of those requirements for the biological mechanisms. (E.g. could such and such a problem be solved without doing a search in a space of branching futures? Or without building structured representations of objects and processes in the environment? Or without reasoning about what processes and actions are possible in a situation and what constrains those possibliites?) o Analysing the kinds of information that organisms need in order to produce some of their behaviours and investigating possible mechanisms for acquiring and using that information -- e.g. information about what information is not yet available, information about how to get missing information, information about the plans or intentions of other individuals, etc. o Using work on requirements and designs for systems that perform in ways that various animals do to pose problems and challenges for theories of the evolution of cognition, or the epigenesis of cognition. o Producing comparative analyses of the requirements related to the environmental constraints and the competences of different species in order to survey the range of possibilities for different designs that could have developed in organisms, moving towards a more general theory of types of information-processing architecture, types of mechanism, types of representation than AI researchers normally propose when they offer specific theories. o Analysing implications of such research for the evolution of possible precursors to human language, including not only behavioural precursors concerned with communication of various forms, but internal mechanisms and forms of representation involved in perception, learning, planning, and acting, that serve non-communicative functions found in pre-verbal humans and in other animals. (E.g. how many animals need and use forms of representation that support compositional semantics in a formalism that supports composition? What sorts of composition would suffice for those behaviours, e.g. logical, pictorial, superposition of neural processes ...?) o Analysing requirements, from an AI standpoint, for meta-semantic competences in organisms, i.e. competences involving the representation not only of structures and processes in the environment, but also the representation of other individuals that acquire, manipulate and use information. What are the implications for animals that need to perceive, learn about, and take account of the cognitive competences of other individuals, or their own mental processes? o Starting from the observation that humans and some other animals have the ability to extend or improve their cognitive competences in various ways (e.g. extending or debugging their ontologies, the forms of representation used, their kinds of self-knowledge, their forms of reasoning, their theories about the environment, their information-processing architectures, and others), can attempts by AI/robotics researchers to formulate requirements or designs for working models of those processes (as in the CogX project http://cogx.eu) generate new research questions for psychologists, neuroscientists or biologists, e.g. about the precise forms of extension found in various species, about how those could be modelled, about how they evolved, etc.? o Discussing implications of the above for other disciplines, including biological sciences (ethology, genetics, epigenetics, developmental biology, etc.), psychology (including developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, studies of perception, learning, problem solving, action, etc.), linguistics, philosophy, ... o Showing how such research on AI-inspired biology can have a feed-back effect, leading to new advances not only in biology, but also in AI, including robotics, and philosophy. o Illustrating two-way influences. Two separate influences from Biology that are important for AI illustrate the need to combine different kinds of information in solving problems or forming percepts, without which simple AI techniques fail. For example, (a)reflections and specularities (highlights) can defeat standard stereo vision algorithms, but help humans see surface structure, and (b) attempts to make machines recognise colours on the basis of wavelengths associated with image regions fail to explain colour constancies, and pictures that generate colour illusions. These phenomena (and many more) suggest that effective (human-like) vision requires mechanisms that can do multiple (soft) constraint propagation from different sources of knowledge. Work in AI has developed constraint propagation mechanisms and it seems likely that attempts to deploy them in multi-functional vision systems will pose new research questions for psychologists and neuroscientists studying vision. -- -- More specific questions: o Can we use AI to extend/revise work done by Piaget and his followers, and drive new experimental developmental psychology? o What current research, e.g. on cognition in primates and birds, is ripe for injection of ideas and problems from an AI standpoint? o What are the problems genetic theory needs to address in order to help us understand the altricial-precocial spectrum -- of competences or species? [Sloman&Chappell, IJCAI 2005, IJUC 2007] E.g. how can genes encode the rich precocial competences of many species (e.g. deer running with the herd very soon after birth), and how can they encode the more abstract "meta-competences" that allow a developing organism to find out what it needs to learn, how it can learn those things, and later to learn them, even if none of its ancestors learnt them (e.g. human toddlers learning to play computer games). o If humans cannot learn mathematics without being taught, who taught the first mathematicians? (This could link up with the symposium on mathematical cognition, if that proposal is accepted.) o Are there non-communicative precursors to human language that have been ignored by researchers working on evolution of language? o What are the really hard unsolved problems regarding forms of representation, ontologies, mechanisms, architectures, types of development, types of learning, ... that require advances in our understanding of both natural cognition and AI? -- PROPOSED ACTIVITIES, TYPE OF SUBMISSIONS ---------------------- The organisers will invite a number of researchers who have already made key contributions to AI-inspired biology. There will also be a call for contributions in the form of papers or posters. The two days will be divided into a number of sessions based on themes whose details will be decided partly on the basis of the results of the call for participation. Several possible themes for sessions are listed above. For poster presenters there will be 'poster-advertising' sessions. -- CASE FOR SUPPORT ----------------------------------------------- The theme of this proposal is obviously closely related to the multidisciplinary aims of SSAISB and to the goals of AI as science since its earliest days. It is closely related to the UKCRC Grand Challenge 5: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/gc/ GC 5: Architecture of Brain and Mind Integrating high level cognitive processes with brain mechanisms and functions in a working robot. Information about the UKCRC Grand Challenges initiative is described here: http://www.ukcrc.org.uk/grand_challenges/ [There will be a Grand Challenge event in Edinburgh next year on April 16 2010, as part of a combined CPHC annual conference (April 13-14), BCS "Visions of Computer Science" conference (April 14-15) and Grand Challenge conference (April 16). Details are still being worked out.] There have been previous workshops related to this theme and it would be timely to include another one in an AISB convention: Precursors include: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/aisb2000/ "HOW TO DESIGN A FUNCTIONING MIND" A two day symposium held at AISB 2000, Birmingham UK (This led to publication of a book edited by Darryl Davis: Visions of Mind: Architectures for Cognition and Affect http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=M9uk__SlVgUC&dq="visions+of+mind"+darryl+davis&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=tdhRStiGNJCNjAfGlb2vBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4 http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cosy/conferences/edinburgh-05.html IJCAI 2005, Edinburgh two day tutorial REPRESENTATION AND LEARNING IN ROBOTS AND ANIMALS (Funded by BT, IBM, and others) http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/gc/aisb06/ AISB 2006, Bristol, two day symposium GC5: Architecture of Brain and Mind: Integrating high level cognitive processes with brain mechanisms and functions in a working robot (Funded by euCognition) http://www.cogric.reading.ac.uk/ Workshop on Cognitive Robotics, Intelligence and Control Windsor August 2006 (Funded by NSF and EPSRC) http://www.cs.arizona.edu/projects/wonac/ International Workshop on Natural and Artificial Cognition Oxford University, June 2007 (Funded by EU+NSF) http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cosy/conferences/mofm-paris-07/latest.html CoSy Meeting of Minds Workshop, Paris, September 2007 Meeting of Minds in Action: Natural and Artificial (Funded by the CoSy Project EU-funded) And others, including the euCognition workshops. The proposers are closely associated with the EU-Funded Cognitive Robotics project: CogX, whose project leader, Jeremy Wyatt, has endorsed this proposal: http://cogx.eu CogX - Cognitive Systems that Self-Understand and Self-Extend -- PROPOSED PARTICIPANTS/PROGRAM COMMITTEE ------------------------ To be added. There is a growing list of interested respondents including offers of papers. Between Tuesday 7th July and Friday 10th July a number of email invitations to support or help with this symposium were sent out. A high percentage of replies came back in that time, and it is likely that a wider call will elicit many more responses. As far as we know this is the first ever use of the phrase 'AI-inspired Biology'. Google gives: No results found for "ai-inspired biology". Responses so far are from researchers in AI, Philosophy, Psychology, and several areas of Biology. Several are from overseas, mainly Europe and the USA, but a wider call would certainly expand the geographical spread. Categories of support: 1. Merely supporting the proposal (as a 'good thing'), without any commitment to do any work, submit anything, or attend the convention. 2. Supporting the proposal because you would be interested in attending, and possibly presenting a paper or poster. 3. Interested in helping, e.g. reviewing submissions. 4. Would like to be on the symposium committee (involves being consulted during the process of organising the event as well as helping with reviewing?) ======================