Total: 8
The aim of this paper is to propose a new overarching challenge for AI: the design of imagination machines. Imagination has been defined as the capacity to mentally transcend time, place, and/or circumstance. Much of the success of AI currently comes from a revolution in data science, specifically the use of deep learning neural networks to extract structure from data. This paper argues for the development of a new field called imagination science, which extends data science beyond its current realm of learning probability distributions from samples. Numerous examples are given in the paper to illustrate that human achievements in the arts, literature, poetry, and science may lie beyond the realm of data science, because they require abilities that go beyond finding correlations: for example, generating samples from a novel probability distribution different from the one given during training; causal reasoning to uncover interpretable explanations; or analogical reasoning to generalize to novel situations (e.g., imagination in art, representing alien life in a distant galaxy, understanding a story about talking animals, or inventing representations to model the large-scale structure of the universe). We describe the key challenges in automating imagination, discuss connections between ongoing research and imagination, and outline why automation of imagination provides a powerful launching pad for transforming AI.
This paper envisions a future where autonomous agents are used to foster and support pro-social behavior in a hybrid society of humans and machines. Pro-social behavior occurs when people and agents perform costly actions that benefit others. Acts such as helping others voluntarily, donating to charity, providing informations or sharing resources, are all forms of pro-social behavior. We discuss two questions that challenge a purely utilitarian view of human decision making and contextualize its role in hybrid societies: i) What are the conditions and mechanisms that lead societies of agents and humans to be more pro-social? ii) How can we engineer autonomous entities (agents and robots) that lead to more altruistic and cooperative behaviors in a hybrid society? We propose using social simulations, game theory, population dynamics, and studies with people in virtual or real environments (with robots) where both agents and humans interact. This research will constitute the basis for establishing the foundations for the new field of Pro-social Computing, aiming at understanding, predicting and promoting pro-sociality among humans, through artificial agents and multiagent systems.
We argue that chemistry should be the next grand challenge for Artificial Intelligence. The AI research community and humanity would benefit tremendously from focusing AI research on chemistry on a regular basis, as a benchmark as well as a real-world application domain. To support our position, we review the importance of chemical compound discovery and synthesis planning and discuss the properties of search spaces in a chemistry problem. Knowledge acquired in domains such as two-player board games or single-player puzzles places the AI community in a good position to solve critical problems in the chemistry domain. Yet, we show that searching in chemistry problems poses significant additional challenges that will have to be addressed. Finally, we envision how several AI areas like Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, planning and search, are relevant for chemistry.
While constraints are ubiquitous in artificial intelligence and constraints are also commonly used in machine learning and data mining, the problem of learning constraints from examples has received less attention. In this paper, we discuss the problem of constraint learning in detail, indicate some subtle differences with standard machine learning problems, sketch some applications and summarize the state-of-the-art.
The state of the art in bidirectional search has changed significantly a very short time period; we now can answer questions about unidirectional and bidirectional search that until very recently we were unable to answer. This paper is designed to provide an accessible overview of the recent research in bidirectional search in the context of the broader efforts over the last 50 years. We give particular attention to new theoretical results and the algorithms they inspire for optimal and near-optimal node expansions when finding a shortest path.
We propose two distinct levels of learning for general autonomous intelligent agents. Level 1 consists of fixed architectural learning mechanisms that are innate and automatic. Level 2 consists of deliberate learning strategies that are controlled by the agent's knowledge. We describe these levels and provide an example of their use in a task-learning agent. We also explore other potential levels and discuss the implications of this view of learning for the design of autonomous agents.
We discuss the connection between computational social choice (comsoc) and computational complexity. We stress the work so far on, and urge continued focus on, two less-recognized aspects of this connection. Firstly, this is very much a two-way street: Everyone knows complexity classification is used in comsoc, but we also highlight benefits to complexity that have arisen from its use in comsoc. Secondly, more subtle, less-known complexity tools often can be very productively used in comsoc.
Unsupervised learning is widely recognized as one of the most important challenges facing machine learning nowadays. However, in spite of hundreds of papers on the topic being published every year, current theoretical understanding and practical implementations of such tasks, in particular of clustering, is very rudimentary. This note focuses on clustering. The first challenge I address is model selection---how should a user pick an appropriate clustering tool for a given clustering problem, and how should the parameters of such an algorithmic tool be tuned? In contrast with other common computational tasks, for clustering, different algorithms often yield drastically different outcomes. Therefore, the choice of a clustering algorithm may play a crucial role in the usefulness of an output clustering solution. However, currently there exists no methodical guidance for clustering tool selection for a given clustering task. I argue the severity of this problem and describe some recent proposals aiming to address this crucial lacuna.