The ReteCog 2011 Workshop is a small-sized network workshop centered around the major topic of cognitive architecture. The ASLab team presents two contributions there:

• The place of the Body in the Architecture of the Mind by Carlos Herrera.
• Review of an Anathema: The Unified Theory of Cognition by Jaime Gómez.

More information can be found in the ReteCog 2011 Workshop Website.

The challenge of creating a real-life computational equivalent of the human mind calls for our joint efforts to better understand at a computational level how natural intelligent systems develop their cognitive and learning functions. In recent years, BICA conference grew up from a AAAI Fall symposium to a mid-size international conference that focuses on the emergent hot topics in computer, brain and cognitive sciences unified by the challenge of replicating the human mind in a computer.

The ASLab team did present a contribution there: A Model of Emotion as Patterned Metacontrol

More information can be found in the BICA Symposium Website.

Sanz at BICA 2011 on Vimeo. See all the video recordings of the conference here.

Cognitive architectures form an integral part of robots and agents. Architectures structure and organize the knowledge used by the agents to select actions in dynamic environments, plan and solve problems, learn, and coordinate with others. Architectures serve to integrate general capabilities expected of an intelligent agent (e.g. planning and learning), to implement and test theories about agent cognition, and to explore domain-independent mechanisms for intelligence.

As AI research has improved in formal and empirical rigor, traditional evaluation methodologies for architectures have sometimes proved insufficient. Formal analysis has often proved elusive; we seem to be missing the notation required for proving properties of architectures. Experiments which demonstrate generality are notoriously expensive to perform, and are not sufficiently informative. And at a high-level, evaluation is difficult because the criteria are not well defined: Is it generality? Ease of programmability? Compatibility with data from biology and psychology? There are no established evaluation methodologies and only a handful established evaluation criteria.

Recognizing that scientific progress depends on the ability to conduct informative evaluation (by experiment or formal analysis), this workshop addressed the methodologies needed for evaluating architectures. The focus is on methodology, rather than specific architectures. The workshop has two goals: To promote discussion and to propose evaluation criteria that will be accepted by the research community as recognized evaluation guidelines.

Carlos Hernández presented the paper Architectural Factors for Intelligence in Autonomous Systems from our team.

See the Workshop Programme or visit the workshop webpage.

ASLab will be represented in the 2006 SMi conference entitled the Future of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. This conference will be held on the 27th and 28th of November 2006, at The Hatton and other venues in London. It is supported by ASD-Network.com, Army-Technology.com, AirInternational.com and Uavworld.com.

The programme will address operations and concepts of UAVs with a view to the future battlefield, looking at the key areas that are influencing their use. The conference will investigate the relationship between UAV development and network centric and network-enabled visions, looking at ISTAR capabilities within military operations, autonomy levels in UAVs and the rules and regulations of flying in military and civil airspace.

The two-day Future of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles conference will examine the military needs of UAV's looking at modern military operations. The conference offers case studies from international programmes and allows attendees to address their key concerns by drawing on the experience of our expert panel.

There is also a half-day post-conference interactive workshop, entitled UAV Positioning, Orientation and Collaborative Behaviour, which will be held at the The Hatton, Central London, on the 29th November 2006, in association with The University of Nottingham and The Defence Academy.