Assessing and characterizing the cognitive power of machine consciousness implementations

Proceeding of: AAAI 2009 Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures-II (BICA-2009). Technical Report FS-09-01. Washington, D.C. EE.UU, 5-7 Noviembre 2009.Many aspects can be taken into account in order to assess the power and potential of a cognitive architecture. In this paper we argue that ConsScale, a cognitive scale inspired on the development of consciousness, can be used to characterize and evaluate cognitive architectures from the point of view of the effective integration of their cognitive functionalities. Additionally, a graphical characterization of the cognitive power of artificial agents is proposed as a helpful tool for the analysis and comparison of Machine Consciousness implementations. This is illustrated with the application of the scale to a particular problem domain in the context of video game synthetic bots.This research has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education under CICYT grant TRA2007-67374-C02-02.Publicad

The cognitive development of machine consciousness implementations

The progress in the machine consciousness research fiel has to be assessed in terms of the features demonstrated by the new models and implementations currently being designed. In this paper, we focus on the functional aspects of consciousness and propose the application of a revision of ConsScale a biologically inspired scale for measuring cognitive development in artificial agents in order to assess the cognitive capabilities of machine consciousness implementations. We argue that the progress in the implementation of consciousness in artificial agents can be assessed by looking at how key cognitive abilities associated to consciousness are integrated within artificial systems. Specifically, we characterize ConsScale as a partially ordered set and propose a particular dependency hierarchy for cognitive skills. Associated to that hierarchy a graphical representation of the cognitive profile of an artificial agent is presented as a helpful analytic tool. The proposed evaluation schema is discussed and applied to a number of significant machine consciousness models and implementations. Finally, the possibility of generating qualia and phenomenological states in machines is discussed in the context of the proposed analysisThis work has been supported by the grant CICYT TRA 2007 67374 C02 0

Robust Computer Algebra, Theorem Proving, and Oracle AI

In the context of superintelligent AI systems, the term "oracle" has two meanings. One refers to modular systems queried for domain-specific tasks. Another usage, referring to a class of systems which may be useful for addressing the value alignment and AI control problems, is a superintelligent AI system that only answers questions. The aim of this manuscript is to survey contemporary research problems related to oracles which align with long-term research goals of AI safety. We examine existing question answering systems and argue that their high degree of architectural heterogeneity makes them poor candidates for rigorous analysis as oracles. On the other hand, we identify computer algebra systems (CASs) as being primitive examples of domain-specific oracles for mathematics and argue that efforts to integrate computer algebra systems with theorem provers, systems which have largely been developed independent of one another, provide a concrete set of problems related to the notion of provable safety that has emerged in the AI safety community. We review approaches to interfacing CASs with theorem provers, describe well-defined architectural deficiencies that have been identified with CASs, and suggest possible lines of research and practical software projects for scientists interested in AI safety.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figure

Evolving artificial neural networks applied to generate virtual characters

Computer game industry is one of the most prof­ itable nowadays. Although this industry has evolved fast in the last years in different fields, Artificial Intelligence (AI) seems to be stuck. Many games still make use of simple state machines to simulate AI. New models can be designed and proposed to replace this jurassic technique. In this paper we propose the use of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) as a new model. ANN will be then in charge of receiving information from the game (sensors) and carry out actions (actuators) according to the information received. The search for the best ANN is a complex task that strongly affects the task performance while often requiring a high computational time. In this work, we present ADANN, a system for the automatic evolution and adaptation of artificial neural networks based on evolutionary ANN (EANN). This approach use Genetic Algorithm (GA) that evolves fully connected Artificial Neural Network. The testing game is called Unreal Tournament 2004. The new agent obtained has been put to the test jointly with CCBot3, the winner of BotPrize 2010 competition [1], and have showed a significant improvement in the humannesss ratio. Additionally, we have confronted our approach and CCBot3 (winner of BotPrize competition in 2010) to First-person believability assessment (BotPrize original judging protocol), demonstrating that the active involvement of the judge has a great impact in the recognition of human-like behaviour

A Model of Emotion as Patterned Metacontrol

Adaptive agents use feedback as a key strategy to cope with un- certainty and change in their environments. The information fed back from the sensorimotor loop into the control subsystem can be used to change four different elements of the controller: parameters associated to the control model, the control model itself, the functional organization of the agent and the functional realization of the agent. There are many change alternatives and hence the complexity of the agent’s space of potential configurations is daunting. The only viable alternative for space- and time-constrained agents —in practical, economical, evolutionary terms— is to achieve a reduction of the dimensionality of this configuration space. Emotions play a critical role in this reduction. The reduction is achieved by func- tionalization, interface minimization and by patterning, i.e. by selection among a predefined set of organizational configurations. This analysis lets us state how autonomy emerges from the integration of cognitive, emotional and autonomic systems in strict functional terms: autonomy is achieved by the closure of functional dependency. Emotion-based morphofunctional systems are able to exhibit complex adaptation patterns at a reduced cognitive cost. In this article we show a general model of how emotion supports functional adaptation and how the emotional biological systems operate following this theoretical model. We will also show how this model is also of applicability to the construction of a wide spectrum of artificial systems1

Backwards is the way forward: feedback in the cortical hierarchy predicts the expected future

Clark offers a powerful description of the brain as a prediction machine, which offers progress on two distinct levels. First, on an abstract conceptual level, it provides a unifying framework for perception, action, and cognition (including subdivisions such as attention, expectation, and imagination). Second, hierarchical prediction offers progress on a concrete descriptive level for testing and constraining conceptual elements and mechanisms of predictive coding models (estimation of predictions, prediction errors, and internal models)

Quality data assessment and improvement in pre-processing pipeline to minimize impact of spurious signals in functional magnetic imaging (fMRI)

In the recent years, the field of quality data assessment and signal denoising in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is rapidly evolving and the identification and reduction of spurious signal with pre-processing pipeline is one of the most discussed topic. In particular, subject motion or physiological signals, such as respiratory or/and cardiac pulsatility, were showed to introduce false-positive activations in subsequent statistical analyses. Different measures for the evaluation of the impact of motion related artefacts, such as frame-wise displacement and root mean square of movement parameters, and the reduction of these artefacts with different approaches, such as linear regression of nuisance signals and scrubbing or censoring procedure, were introduced. However, we identify two main drawbacks: i) the different measures used for the evaluation of motion artefacts were based on user-dependent thresholds, and ii) each study described and applied their own pre-processing pipeline. Few studies analysed the effect of these different pipelines on subsequent analyses methods in task-based fMRI.The first aim of the study is to obtain a tool for motion fMRI data assessment, based on auto-calibrated procedures, to detect outlier subjects and outliers volumes, targeted on each investigated sample to ensure homogeneity of data for motion. The second aim is to compare the impact of different pre-processing pipelines on task-based fMRI using GLM based on recent advances in resting state fMRI preprocessing pipelines. Different output measures based on signal variability and task strength were used for the assessment

Predicting Dementia Screening and Staging Scores From Semantic Verbal Fluency Performance

International audienc

Understanding the Role of Dynamics in Brain Networks: Methods, Theory and Application

The brain is inherently a dynamical system whose networks interact at multiple spatial and temporal scales. Understanding the functional role of these dynamic interactions is a fundamental question in neuroscience. In this research, we approach this question through the development of new methods for characterizing brain dynamics from real data and new theories for linking dynamics to function. We perform our study at two scales: macro (at the level of brain regions) and micro (at the level of individual neurons). In the first part of this dissertation, we develop methods to identify the underlying dynamics at macro-scale that govern brain networks during states of health and disease in humans. First, we establish an optimization framework to actively probe connections in brain networks when the underlying network dynamics are changing over time. Then, we extend this framework to develop a data-driven approach for analyzing neurophysiological recordings without active stimulation, to describe the spatiotemporal structure of neural activity at different timescales. The overall goal is to detect how the dynamics of brain networks may change within and between particular cognitive states. We present the efficacy of this approach in characterizing spatiotemporal motifs of correlated neural activity during the transition from wakefulness to general anesthesia in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. Moreover, we demonstrate how such an approach can be utilized to construct an automatic classifier for detecting different levels of coma in electroencephalogram (EEG) data. In the second part, we study how ongoing function can constraint dynamics at micro-scale in recurrent neural networks, with particular application to sensory systems. Specifically, we develop theoretical conditions in a linear recurrent network in the presence of both disturbance and noise for exact and stable recovery of dynamic sparse stimuli applied to the network. We show how network dynamics can affect the decoding performance in such systems. Moreover, we formulate the problem of efficient encoding of an afferent input and its history in a nonlinear recurrent network. We show that a linear neural network architecture with a thresholding activation function is emergent if we assume that neurons optimize their activity based on a particular cost function. Such an architecture can enable the production of lightweight, history-sensitive encoding schemes