Mind RACES First Review Meeting Introduction

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Mind RACESFirst Review MeetingIntroduction

• Rino Falcone - Project Coordinator
• Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies
• National Research Council of Italy

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Meeting Schedule

• Introduction
• Activities on the Scenarios (WP2)
• Activities of advancement on anticipation
• Activities on the thematic workpackages (WP3,
  WP4, WP5)
• Activities about the Integration (WP6)
• Robotic Demo
• Simulation Demo
• Some challenging questions

Comparison
The frontiers
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Cognitive Systems and Anticipation
From the Objective of the 'Cognitive Systems
Action Line To construct physically
instantiated or embodied systems that can
perceive, understand and interact with their
environment, and evolve in order to achieve
human-like performance in activities requiring
context-(situation and task) specific knowledge
It is really difficult to think about systems
performing like (and interacting with) humans
without any mechanism of anticipation
Only a cognitive system with anticipation
mechanisms can be credible, adaptive, and
successful in interaction with the environment
and in social interaction with other autonomous
systems and with humans
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The Anticipatory Nature of Mind
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MindRACES Goal
The general goal of the Mind RACES project is to
investigate different anticipatory cognitive
mechanisms and architectures, their
functionalities and integrations in order to
build Cognitive Systems endowed with the ability
- to predict the outcome of their actions, - to
build a model of future events, - to control
their perception anticipating future stimuli
and - to emotionally react to possible future
scenarios
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Cognitive Systems and Anticipation
In many other works (also in ),
anticipation was implicitly and indirectly managed
Anticipation
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Prediction and Anticipation
An anticipatory system is a system containing a
predictive model of itself and/or of its
environment that allows it to change state at an
instant in accord with the models predictions
pertaining to a later instant (Robert
Rosen) Prediction is a representation that a
particular event will occur in the
future Anticipation is a future-oriented
action/decision/behavior based on a (implicit or
explicit) prediction
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Purposes of Anticipation
Anticipatory processes serve many purposes -
increasing agents promptness to react - raising
the possibility of success in managing the huge
amount of stimuli and information we receive -
aiding autonomous agents in interaction and
coordination with the environment and with other
agents
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Cycle Prediction-Anticipation
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The Prediction bases

• Low level 'predictions' are based on
• some form of 'statistical' learning (on
  frequency and regular sequences, on judgment of
  normality in direct perceptual experience), on
  the strength of associative links and on the
  probability of activation (Kahneman Miller
  1986 Ortony Partridge 1987).
• High level predictions have many different
  sources
• Analogy (The first time he was very elegant, I
  think that he will be well dressed) and, in
  general,
• Inferences and Reasoning (He is Italian thus he
  will love pasta), to natural laws and frame
  problem and - in social domain -
• Norms, Roles, Conventions, Habits, Scripts (He
  will not do so here it is prohibited),
• Theory of Mind (He hate John, so he will try
  to He decided to go in vacation, so he will
  not be here on Monday).
• Emotion-based predictions
• Emotions eliciting an anticipatory behavior (for
  example arousal)
• Emotions eliciting predictions (for example fear
  eliciting belief of danger)

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Kinds of Anticipation
Explicit Anticipation (the organism/system is
able to generate representations of the
forthcoming events at different time
scales) Implicit Anticipation or behavioral
anticipation (the response is associated with a
stimulus (a precursor). The behavior is selected
to react to the event that is forthcoming
(preparatory behavior)

• Precursory stimulus
• e.g. noise

• ? Preparatory behavior
• jump

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Consortium Expertise on Anticipation
Expertise on Anticipation
Partner
Anticipatory Behavioral Control
UW-COGSCI
OFAI
Interactive Categorization, Symbol Grounding,
Learning
Optimal Prediction, Learning, Attention
IDSIA
Expectation theory, Trust theory, Emotions Neural
Bases of Action and Planning
ISTC
Emotions, Affective Interaction
IST
Bio-inspired models of Attention, Learning
LUND
NBU
Analogical Reasoning, Context
NOZE
Cognitive Architectures
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Project Characteristics
- Inter-disciplinarity (Artificial Life,
Artificial Intelligence, symbolic and
sub-symbolic approach, Psychology, Biology,
etc.) - Unification (coherent theory and
ontology of anticipatory phenomena) - Multiple
approaches to the Anticipation (from
sensori-motor to social coordination) -
Functional Integration (from an architectural
point of view to an effective integration of
mechanisms) - Multiple approaches to the
implementation and explorative experimentation of
the models (conceptual, formal, simulative,
robotic)
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Different Cognitive Functions
MindRACES is studying anticipatory mechanisms in
different Cognitive Functions
Attention, Monitoring, and Control (Work Package
3) Goal directed behaviour, Pro-activity, and
Analogy (Work Package 4) Emotional
Processes (Work Package 5)
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Cognitive Functions in WP3
Attention, Monitoring and Control (Work Package
3) The general goal of the cognitive system
explored in this WP is to understand the world
around it by focussing on the relevant details,
hence the cognitive system is mainly motivated by
an epistemic goal. The emphasis is on selective
attention and knowledge representation viz. not
on the use of knowledge for the guidance of
action (to achieve pragmatic goals).
Active perception main focus in low-level
perception. The cognitive system is able to
perceive only by means of both sensors and
actions that produce as effects new sensory
signals (i.e. self-modification of the body
orientation towards the stimuli). The cognitive
system is attuned to changes in the sensory
inputs. Constructive perception is focussed on
high-level perception where the sensorial
stimulation is structured or organized through
the application of schemas (recognition). The
percepts are constructed through the
schematization of the sensorial stimulation
(sensations). The schemes are seen as procedures
to construct and interpret the percepts.
Anticipatory mechanisms Expectation-based
attention shifting, attention as epistemic
control, constructive perception
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Cognitive Functions in WP4
Goal directed behaviour, Pro-activity and Analogy
(Work Package 4) Cognitive system uses models of
the world that take into consideration the
consequences of its own action, that is models of
the world that predict the future state of the
world on the basis of current state and the
planned action (also known as forward models).
Anticipation for deciding what to do next
predictions are compared with a goal state not
with a world/sensorial state and are used for
action/plan selection. Anticipation for action
monitoring expectations are compared with the
actual state and the match/mismatch information
is used e.g. for adjusting and tuning actions,
generating surprise, shifting from a routine to a
deliberative control, compile behaviours,
etc. Anticipatory mechanisms Sub-symbolic
planning, pro-active activation of goals,
anticipation at different time scales and levels
of abstractions (i.e. anticipatory classifiers),
construction of models of future events based on
analogy
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Cognitive Functions in WP5
Anticipatory Emotions (Work Package 5) In this
Project emotions are those bodily motions that
are not simply information about bodily processes
and states, but are about an event or
imagination, have a subjective qualitative value
(are pleasant/unpleasant), and represent an
implicit felt evaluation of that event or idea
(not based on reasons)
Three different relationships between emotion and
anticipation i) Emotions eliciting an
anticipatory (preparatory) behavior ii) Emotions
due to Anticipatory Representations a) Emotion
now as a response to the predicted future
event b) Emotion at the very predicted moment
due to the previous expectation and its
(mis)match with reality iii) Anticipating
Future Emotions
Anticipatory mechanisms goals activation based
anticipatory affective states (somatic markers),
affective monitoring of goals satisfaction,
appraisal of future events on the basis of
perceived signs
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Scenarios Role

• Function The identification of the scenarios
  was based on the consideration that common
  scenarios should be considered as a mean
• to match different models, mechanisms and
  architectures
• to achieve integration among the different
  approaches characterizing the partners

• Objective identify 6 scenarios corresponding to
  the situation in which cognition requires
  anticipation and implement 3 of them.
• Three domains
• Anticipation in perception, selective attention
  and knowledge representation
• Anticipation of the consequences of ones own
  action for decisions and action monitoring
• Anticipation and emotions

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Results after 1 year

• - MindRACES assessed weaknesses and strengths of
  the main existing architectures in generating
  predictions and using those predictions for the
  generation of anticipatory cognitive functions
  (D4, D5, D6)
• - MindRACES analyzed 27 scenarios. It identified
  and selected 6 of them corresponding to the
  situation in which cognition requires
  anticipation and we are going to implement 3 of
  them (D3)
• - MindRACES realized advancements in software
  architectures and robotic hardware useful for
  introducing mechanisms of anticipation (D7)
• - MindRACES realized advancements in existing
  cognitive systems introducing mechanisms of
  prediction/anticipation (D7)
• - Towards the integration significance advances
  in sharing concepts, problems, methodologies
  among the various MindRACES approaches (D8)

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Practical Goals of MindRACES
1) incorporate anticipatory functionalities into
existing cognitive models 2) improve
anticipatory functionalities of existing
cognitive models 3) integrate different
anticipatory functionalities of cognitive models
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Achievements improve anticipatory
functionalities of existing cognitive models
Improvement
Partner
Functionality
Starting Model
UW
XACS2- Anticipatory Classifiers
Artificial Immune System (AIS)
OFAI
Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), Long Short-Term
Memory (LSTM)
IDSIA
ISTC/Noze
Schema Mechanism
ISTC
Neural Networks, reinforcement learning
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Achievements Incorporate anticipatory
functionalities into existing cognitive models
Improvement
Partner
Functionality
Starting Model
LUCS
Visual Attention in IKAROS
NBU
Associative Memory Based Reasoning (AMBR)
IST
Believable character architecture
Belief Desire Intention Architecture (BDI)
ISTC
ISTC/Noze
Agent-based cognitive architecture AKIRA
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First steps towards Integration
- Theoretical analysis of the MindRACES models
and architectures from the perspective of
possible integration of anticipatory mechanisms.
MindRaces has developed an integration analysis
it has been made a systematic analysis of the
possible integration needed to overcome
successfully difficult aspects of the
scenarios - Selection of promising integration
and - Implementation in integrated models The
integration of mechanisms of any kind is
considered worthwhile if it improves
non-trivially the performance of the model
compared to a model using a single mechanism or a
formal combination of two mechanisms
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Dissemination - Confrontation
In addition to the traditional events about the
project dissemination (Conferences and workshops,
Publications in scientific journals,
International workshop about Anticipatory
Systems, Interviews, Project Presentation,
etc.) AAAI 2005 Fall Symposium

From Reactive to Anticipatory Cognitive Embodied
Systems November 3-6, 2005, Hyatt Crystal City
in Arlington, Virginia Presentation of MindRACES
Project
(Mark Bickhard, Stephen Grossberg ,
Andrew Ortony, Deb Roy )
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Blueprint of the day
Introduction
Themes and Approaches