"Conscious" Software
By a "conscious" software agent we mean a cognitive
agent (an autonomous agent with human-like
cognitive features) designed within the constraints of Baars'
global workspace theory of consciousness.
Like the Roman god Janus, the conscious software project has two faces,
its science face and its engineering face. Its science side will flesh out
the global workspace theory of consciousness, while its engineering side
explores architectural designs for information agents that promise more
flexible, more human-like intelligence within their domains. The fleshed
out global workspace theory will yield a multitude of testable hypotheses
about human cognition. The architectures and mechanisms that underlie consciousness
and intelligence in humans can be expected to yield information agents that
learn continuously, that adapt readily to dynamic environments, and that
behave flexibly and intelligently when faced with novel and unexpected situations.
A brief account of the "conscious" software projects can be found
here. Drafts of several papers providing more
details will soon be online.
Learning
Concepts in Software Agents (with Uma Ramamurthy and Aregahegn Negatu),
From Animals to Animat (Proc. SAB'98)
to appear.
Metacognition in
Software Agents Using Classifier Systems (with Zhaohua Zhang and Dipankar
Dasgupta) Proceedings of the Fifteenth National Conference on Artificial
Intelligence, Madison, Wisconsin. Cambridge: MIT Press, 83-88.
IDA: A Cognitive Agent Architecture, (with Arpad
Kelemen and Lee McCauley) Proc IEEE
SMC'98 to appear
"Conscious" Software: A Computational
View of Mind, submitted to Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
Action Selection and Language Generation in
"Conscious" Software Agents Proc. Workshop on Behavior Planning
for
Life-Like Characters and Avatars, i3 Spring Days '99, March, Sitges, Spain.
Behavioral Learning for Adaptive Software
Agent, (with Aregahegn Negatu) Intelligent Systems: Proceedings of
the ISCA 5th
International Conference (Reno Nevada, June 1999). Raleigh NC: International
Society for Computers and Their Applications - ISCA.