By Roland Piquepaille
ERCIM News is a quarterly publication from the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics. The April 2003 issue is dedicated to research about cognitive systems. It contains no less than 21 articles which are all available online.Before going further, please visit "A Gallery of Cognitive Systems" which contains a selection of stories, including abstracts and illustrations (the whole page weighs 217KB).
Here is the cover of this issue. I really like the robot's blue wig.
Now, here are excerpts from the introduction to this special issue, "Towards an Integration of Symbolic and Sensor-Motor Intelligence?"
The European Commission has identified Cognitive Systems as one of the priorities for the new generation of research projects to be developed from 2003 to 2008. The stated objective is to construct physically instantiated or embodied systems that can perceive, understand (the semantics of information conveyed through their perceptual input) and interact with their environment, and evolve in order to achieve human-like performance in activities requiring context-(situation and task) specific knowledge.
ERCIM News has chosen to devote a special issue to this exciting research challenge in order to monitor what is under development in Europe (but not only in Europe), and what is the current status of research and development in this domain.
Cristiano Castelfranchi gives more details about the possible applications.
Cognitive Systems is a really important research area from both scientific and technological perspectives, dealing with physical environments and mental representations, and exploiting both experience (learning) and inference (reasoning) in order to be able to autonomously explore, learn, react, decide, solve problems, coordinate with each other, interact with humans, etc. There are numerous and important applications under way, from space exploration to emergency handling, from industry to domestic assistance, to worrying military applications.
Source: ERCIM News No. 53, April 2003
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