Re: Cognitive Systems Paradigm - P Langley

Glad you find the article interesting and relevant, have been reading some
other stuff by Langley
and his work is an important reference for me,
I wonder if we could persuade him to join us in a webinar,
P

On Fri, Feb 12, 2021 at 6:49 PM Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> wrote:

> Thanks for the pointer.
>
> I very much concur with the importance of a systems level perspective.
> Work in linguistics, for instance, has focused on syntactic details of
> language, but language is essentially a means for one mind to communicate
> meaning to another. Building executable end to end models of communication
> via language would provide a firm foundation for evaluating theories of how
> language is learned and evolves through use, turning linguistics from a
> descriptive science into an experimental one.
>
> Langley comments on the popularity of formal guarantees, and I’ve long
> noticed that many publications have included mathematical models, lemmas
> and proofs, as a way to strengthen the case they make, despite starting
> from dubious assumptions. A related point is the faith in mathematical
> logic and formal semantics as being superior to other approaches.
>
> I also believe in the value of functional level requirements as a basis
> for decoupling higher level theories from the underlying implementations.
> This corresponds to transforming problems into models that are easier to
> work with, something that has been a boon to physics. Of course we still
> want to understand how the brain approximates these higher level models.
> This is where simulations of pulsed neural networks can work in hand with
> improvements in neuroscience. Work on Deep Learning has diverged from
> biologically plausible models, and unsurprisingly, fails to mirror the
> capabilities of the human brain in major ways.
>
> Another term in vogue is “human-like AI” which has the benefit of being
> immediately understandable to a broad audience, along with the implications
> of a broader scope than cognition. Moreover, experimental data of human
> subjects can guide theories and their evaluation, e.g. eye tracking data in
> relation to natural language processing.
>
> Langley concludes that "we need demonstrations of flexible, high-level
> cognition in less constrained settings that require the combination of
> inference, problem solving, and language into more complete intelligent
> systems”.
>
> This is very much in line with the ambitions of the W3C Cognitive AI CG.
>
> On 12 Feb 2021, at 05:55, Paola Di Maio <paola.dimaio@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> This week  Reader
> important points, ie in the beginning, there was no separation between AI
> and Cognitive Systems
>
> *  The early days of artificial intelligence were guided by a common
> vision: understanding and reproducing, in computational systems, the full
> range of intelligent behavior that we observe in humans. Many researchers
> continued to share these aims until the 1980s and 1990s, when AI began to
> fragment into a variety of specialized subdisciplines, each with far more
> limited objectives. This produced progress in each area, but, in the
> process, many abandoned the field’s original goal. Rather than creating
> intelligent systems with the same breadth and flexibility as humans, most
> recent research has produced impressive but narrow idiot savants. The
> field’s central goal was to understand the nature of the mind. This is one
> of the core aims of science, on an equal footing with questions about the
> nature of the universe, the nature of matter, and the nature of life. As
> such, it deserves the same respect and attention it received during
> discipline’s initial periods. However, since mainstream AI has largely
> abandoned this goal, we require a new name for research that remains
> committed to the original vision. For this purpose, I propose the phrase
> cognitive systems, which Brachman and Lemnios (2002) championed at DARPA in
> their efforts to encourage research in this early tradition. As we will see
> later, this label incorporates some key ideas behind the movement  *
>
>
>
>   The Cognitive Systems Paradigm
> P Langley
> http://www.cogsys.org/pdf/paper-1-2.pdf
>
>
> Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett
> W3C Data Activity Lead & W3C champion for the Web of things
>
>
>
>
>