Proceedings of the KI 2009 Workshop on Complex Cognition

The KI ´09 workshop on Complex Cognition was a joint venture of the Cognition group of the Special Interest Group Artificial Intelligence of the German Computer Science Society (Gesellschaft für Informatik) and the German Cognitive Science Association. Dealing with complexity has become one of the great challenges for modern information societies. To reason and decide, plan and act in complex domains is no longer limited to highly specialized professionals in restricted areas such as medical diagnosis, controlling technical processes, or serious game playing. Complexity has reached everyday life and affects people in such mundane activities as buying a train ticket, investing money, or connecting a home desktop to the internet. Research in cognitive AI can contribute to supporting people navigating through the jungle of everyday reasoning, decision making, planning and acting by providing intelligent support technology. Lessons learned from expert systems research of the nineteen-eighties show that the aim should not be to provide for fully automated systems which can solve specialized tasks autonomously but instead to develop interactive assistant systems where user and system work together by taking advantage of the respective strengths of human and machine. To accomplish a smooth collaboration between humans and intelligent systems, basic research in cognition is a necessary precondition. Insights into cognitive structures and processes underlying successful human reasoning and planning can provide suggestions for algorithm design. Even more important, insights into restrictions and typical errors and misconceptions of the cognitive systems provide information about those parts of a complex task from which the human should be relieved. For successful human-computer interaction in complex domains it has, furthermore, to be decided which information should be presented when, in what way, to the user. We strongly believe that symbolic approaches of AI and psychological research of higher cognition are at the core of success for the endeavor to create intelligent assistant system for complex domains. While insight into the neurological processes of the brain and into the realization of basic processes of perception, attention and senso-motoric coordination are important for the basic understanding of the principles of human intelligence, these processes have a much too fine granularity for the design and realization of interactive systems which must communicate with the user on knowledge level. If human system users are not to be incapacitated by a system, system decisions must be transparent for the user and the system must be able to provide explanations for the reasons of its proposals and recommendations. Therefore, even when some of the underlying algorithms are based on statistical or neuronal approaches, the top-level of such systems must be symbolical and rule-based. The papers presented at this workshop on complex cognition give an inspiring and promising overview of current work in the field which can provide first building stones for our endeavor to create knowledge level intelligent assistant systems for complex domains. The topics cover modelling basic cognitive processes, interfacing subsymbolic and symbolic representations, dealing with continuous time, Bayesian identification of problem solving strategies, linguistically inspired methods for assessing complex cognitive processes and complex domains such as recognition of sketches, predicting changes in stocks, spatial information processing, and coping with critical situations

Knowledge of knots: shapes in action

Logic is to natural language what knot theory is to natural knots. Logic is concerned with some cognitive performances; in particular, some natural language inferences are captured by various types of calculi (propositional, predicate, modal, deontic, quantum, probabilistic, etc.), which in turn may generate inferences that are arguably beyond natural logic abilities, or non-well synchronized therewith (eg. ex falso quodlibet, material implication). Mathematical knot theory accounts for some abilities - such as recognizing sameness or differences of some knots, and in turn generates a formalism for distinctions that common sense is blind to. Logic has proven useful in linguistics and in accounting for some aspects of reasoning, but which knotting performaces are there, over and beyond some intuitive discriminating abilities, that may require extensions or restrictions of the normative calculus of knots? Are they amenable to mathematical treatment? And what role is played in the game by mental representations? I shall draw from a corpus of techniques and practices to show to what extent compositionality, lexical and normative elements are present in natural knots, with the prospect of formally exploring an area of human competence that interfaces thought, perception and action in a complex fabric