Status report

A quick update on progress …

I’ve recently fixed the chunks javascript library to use exclamation rather than tilda for negation, and extended the test suite to cover matching of lists, and negation on list items and chunks.

I am surveying work on cognitive models of emotion and the mirror neuron system, and look forward to discussing this in an upcoming call. Emotions are about cognitive control and prioritising what is important at any moment, including physiological, social and cognitive needs. It seems likely that emotions can be learned rather than being necessarily innate.

The mirror neuron system relates to how we perceive observed behaviour in terms of the actions needed to reproduce it (mimicry) and in terms of causal explanations (intent). This in turn relates to how we detect the unexpected based upon a mismatch between what we observe and what we predict, using mental simulations.

This further relates to emotions in respect to anticipated and actual reward/distress for our actions. The anticipated reward/distress determines our behaviour, whilst the difference between the anticipated and actual reward/distress drives learning.

This is important for scaling up cognitive agents, and overcoming the hurdle of manual knowledge engineering by enabling cognitive agents to learn like children in the classroom and playground.  I want to be able to apply this to natural language and high level cognition.

Tomorrow is a public holiday in the UK, but I am hoping to arrange a telecon for the following Monday and will send out details and an agenda this week, including pointers to relevant papers and other background materials.

p.s. my thanks to Joscha Bach (Intel) for some helpful conversations.

Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett
W3C Data Activity Lead & W3C champion for the Web of things