Thinking Skills in England's National Curriculum

This paper sets out to explore some of the issues raised by the introduction of a number of particular skills in the English National Curriculum known collectively as thinking skills. These skills are now embedded in the National Curriculum and teachers are required to address them as part of their daily duties. This paper argues that presenting such a limited selection of skills as the foundation for effective thinking may lead to an inadequate approach to enhancing pupils’ thinking. Although creative thinking is emphasised in addition to the considerable focus on reasoning in the list of thinking skills presented in the National Curriculum, silence prevails on other types of thinking of equal significance such as, contemplation and sign-cognition (a form of pre-verbal and pre-imaginal form of cognition). The paper attempts to highlight the need for the awareness of the complex nature of thinking and concludes by highlighting the opportunities that the introduction thinking skills offer teachers

Neurons and symbols: a manifesto

We discuss the purpose of neural-symbolic integration including its principles, mechanisms and applications. We outline a cognitive computational model for neural-symbolic integration, position the model in the broader context of multi-agent systems, machine learning and automated reasoning, and list some of the challenges for the area of neural-symbolic computation to achieve the promise of effective integration of robust learning and expressive reasoning under uncertainty

Information system support in construction industry with semantic web technologies and/or autonomous reasoning agents

Information technology support is hard to find for the early design phases of the architectural design process. Many of the existing issues in such design decision support tools appear to be caused by a mismatch between the ways in which designers think and the ways in which information systems aim to give support. We therefore started an investigation of existing theories of design thinking, compared to the way in which design decision support systems provide information to the designer. We identify two main strategies towards information system support in the early design phase: (1) applications for making design try-outs, and (2) applications as autonomous reasoning agents. We outline preview implementations for both approaches and indicate to what extent these strategies can be used to improve information system support for the architectural designer

Value-based argumentation frameworks as neural-symbolic learning systems

While neural networks have been successfully used in a number of machine learning applications, logical languages have been the standard for the representation of argumentative reasoning. In this paper, we establish a relationship between neural networks and argumentation networks, combining reasoning and learning in the same argumentation framework. We do so by presenting a new neural argumentation algorithm, responsible for translating argumentation networks into standard neural networks. We then show a correspondence between the two networks. The algorithm works not only for acyclic argumentation networks, but also for circular networks, and it enables the accrual of arguments through learning as well as the parallel computation of arguments

Dimensions of Neural-symbolic Integration - A Structured Survey

Research on integrated neural-symbolic systems has made significant progress in the recent past. In particular the understanding of ways to deal with symbolic knowledge within connectionist systems (also called artificial neural networks) has reached a critical mass which enables the community to strive for applicable implementations and use cases. Recent work has covered a great variety of logics used in artificial intelligence and provides a multitude of techniques for dealing with them within the context of artificial neural networks. We present a comprehensive survey of the field of neural-symbolic integration, including a new classification of system according to their architectures and abilities.Comment: 28 page

Design thinking support: information systems versus reasoning

Numerous attempts have been made to conceive and implement appropriate information systems to support architectural designers in their creative design thinking processes. These information systems aim at providing support in very diverse ways: enabling designers to make diverse kinds of visual representations of a design, enabling them to make complex calculations and simulations which take into account numerous relevant parameters in the design context, providing them with loads of information and knowledge from all over the world, and so forth. Notwithstanding the continued efforts to develop these information systems, they still fail to provide essential support in the core creative activities of architectural designers. In order to understand why an appropriately effective support from information systems is so hard to realize, we started to look into the nature of design thinking and on how reasoning processes are at play in this design thinking. This investigation suggests that creative designing rests on a cyclic combination of abductive, deductive and inductive reasoning processes. Because traditional information systems typically target only one of these reasoning processes at a time, this could explain the limited applicability and usefulness of these systems. As research in information technology is increasingly targeting the combination of these reasoning modes, improvements may be within reach for design thinking support by information systems

(Co-)Inductive semantics for Constraint Handling Rules

In this paper, we address the problem of defining a fixpoint semantics for Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) that captures the behavior of both simplification and propagation rules in a sound and complete way with respect to their declarative semantics. Firstly, we show that the logical reading of states with respect to a set of simplification rules can be characterized by a least fixpoint over the transition system generated by the abstract operational semantics of CHR. Similarly, we demonstrate that the logical reading of states with respect to a set of propagation rules can be characterized by a greatest fixpoint. Then, in order to take advantage of both types of rules without losing fixpoint characterization, we present an operational semantics with persistent. We finally establish that this semantics can be characterized by two nested fixpoints, and we show the resulting language is an elegant framework to program using coinductive reasoning.Comment: 17 page

Overview of Hydra: a concurrent language for synchronous digital circuit design

Hydra is a computer hardware description language that integrates several kinds of software tool (simulation, netlist generation and timing analysis) within a single circuit specification. The design language is inherently concurrent, and it offers black box abstraction and general design patterns that simplify the design of circuits with regular structure. Hydra specifications are concise, allowing the complete design of a computer system as a digital circuit within a few pages. This paper discusses the motivations behind Hydra, and illustrates the system with a significant portion of the design of a basic RISC processor