Cognitive Architectures
Introduction
In the engineering of machine intelligence one cannot disregard natural inteligence that humans, together with other animals, display. Intelligence is here understood in the broad sense of behaving appropriately situated in an environment, as in the case of a fight-or-flight response for securing survival, as well as in the case of a mathematician proving a theorem. In these situations, hard to cast as a neat optimization problem, scientists often look into biology for inspiration. What biological evolution solved before has the potential for, at very least, provide guidance on how to approach the problem.
Research in this area is focused on
- decision-making, namely in the interplay between emotion mechanisms and rationality, and on
- robotic platforms (e.g., humanoid robots) situated in a physical environment, socially interacting with humans, other robots, and objects in the environment.