Weekly QuEST Discussion Topics, 28 Sept

QuEST Friday 28 Sept 2018

A question I’ve been pondering is what set of processes does our multi-agent system have to include to achieve what we seek in an agile efficient means of bringing AI at scale to mission capabilities.  One idea I want to discuss this week is from a ‘humanity’ perspective as a species what makes us so unique.  In QuEST we focus on the cognitive approaches nature has converged on and often discuss capabilities they afford humans.  An example is our ability to work in groups (social) … – it is easy to map those concerns to what we need our multi-agent system to embody to have a MAS Culture inside KiP – often the question is asked is this (culture) because of our cognitive ability or is culture the key that drove the development of our cognitive solution – is it that we had to develop cognitive infrastructure to enable social structures and that fed back on itself – Does Culture drive a set of agents to develop cognitive solutions that make the group of agents more robust / flexible / successful?  To have this discussion we will use the article – and attempt to extrapolate KiP processes:

HOW WE BECAME A DIFFERENT KIND OF ANIMAL: AN EVOLVED UNIQUENESS

By: LALAND, KEVIN. Scientific

American. Sep2018, Vol. 319 Issue 3, p32-39. 8p

• The article discusses research supporting the uniqueness of Homo sapiens among other Hominin.
• Topics include humans’ ability to acquire knowledge from others and use that knowledge to solve life challenges, the ability of humans to teach skills to others with precision over generations, and the impact of ancestors on the physical and social environments, and therefore the evolution, of humans.
• ability of humans to teach skills to others with precision over generations, and the impact of ancestors on the physical and social environments, and therefore the evolution, of humans. **** should we include these aspects in our FAQ?
• From our FAQ:  Intelligence is the ability of an agent to gather observations, create knowledge, and appropriately apply that knowledge to accomplish tasks (task could be to make a decision or to achieve an effect – we subsume both in our ‘improve every decision’ tagline)
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a machine that possesses intelligence

What we are seeking from this discussion is implications in to Knowledge Platform –

• The emerging consensus is that humanity’s accomplishments derive from an ability to acquire knowledge and skills from other people. Individuals then build iteratively on that reservoir of pooled knowledge over long periods.
• This communal store of experience enables creation of ever more efficient and diverse solutions to life’s challenges.
• It was not our large brains, intelligence or language that gave us culture but rather our culture that gave us large brains, intelligence and language. For our species and perhaps a small number of other species, too, culture transformed the evolutionary process.

So the question we want to address in our discussion is the ‘culture’ that has to be nurtured in our multi-agent system that will result in an ‘intelligent KiP’.

No QuEST Meeting this week,21 Sept

just a note that there will be no QuEST meeting this week due to Cap’s travel schedule.  We will plan to resume the following week.  Thanks and have a great weekend!

Weekly QuEST Discussion Topics, 14 Sept

QuEST Friday 14 Sept 2018

What is the difference between big-data and artificial intelligence with respect to business models?  Is there an equivalent to ‘agile’ software development for machine learning?  To have this discussion we want to use an article provided by our colleague Prof George:

Models Will Run the World; The software revolution has transformed business. What’s next? Processes that constantly improve themselves without need of human intervention.
Cohen, Steven A;

…

• Today most industry-leading companies are software companies, and not all started out as such.
• Aptiv and Domino’s Pizza, for instance, are longstanding leaders in their sectors that have adopted software to maintain or extend their competitive dominance.

…

• We believe a new, more powerful, business model has evolved from its software predecessor.
• These companies structure their business processes to put continuously learning models, built on “closed loop” data, at the center of what they do.
• When built right, they create a reinforcing cycle:
• Their products get better, allowing them to collect more data, which allows them to build better models, making their products better, and onward.
• These are model-driven businesses.
• They are being created inside incumbents and startups across a range of industries.
• If software ate the world, models will run it.
• There is no shortage of hype about artificial intelligence and big data, but models are the source of the real power behind these tools.
• A model is a decision framework in which the logic is derived by algorithm from data, rather than explicitly programmed by a developer or implicitly conveyed via a person’s intuition.
• The output is a prediction on which a decision can be made.
• Once created, a model can learn from its successes and failures with speed and sophistication that humans usually cannot match.

If there is time we also want to insert some discussion on an interview with Google X – Director Astro Teller – his insights into attacking big problems with AI are interesting:

Google X is the Moonshot factory for alphabet – what their product is for alphabet – not building things but building businesses – built waymo – the self driving car group

Google brain came from X – graduated back to google instead of setting up as independent entity – like Waymo – or Verily the life sciences – google scale over the horizon type of things

ML – one part of AI (Astro has a PhD in AI from CMU) is on the upswing – but this is not IT for AI – this is just another false dawn – due to Moore’s law and algorithms … – and data – but still silo’d solutions –

Not near on general AI – not near on terminators – we are not dusting off our hands saying we’ve done it – AI is still a work in progress

…

There was also the article:

https://warontherocks.com/2018/05/its-either-a-panda-or-a-gibbon-ai-winters-and-the-limits-of-deep-learning/

‘It’s Either a Panda or a Gibbon’: AI Winters and the Limits of Deep Learning

Robert Richbourg

May 10, 2018

From a Nobel Laureate on the MIT faculty: “Intuition, insight, and learning are no longer exclusive possessions of human beings: any large high-speed computer can be programed to exhibit them also.”

Herbert Simon wrote this in 1958. Could it have been last week?

Today, the defense community is considering artificial intelligence as a possible solution for an array of problems. The Pentagon is accelerating its artificial intelligence efforts (nearly 600 Pentagon projects include an AI component) following on the visible success of the Project Maven initiative. Others are concerned that adversaries investing heavily in these technologies will produce highly autonomous and adaptive weapons that might overmatch U.S. defenses. After all, data analytics, deep learning, and deep neural network technologies have achieved some remarkable successes in recent years.

However, both historical evidence and the known limits of these technologies argue for a more conservative estimate of their general potential…

Lastly there was an article by our Sec AF – many of you know I have an ongoing interest in ‘ethics’ associated with AI:

Air Force Secretary: The Law of War and
the Power of Computing

…

• In terms of computer-driven change, the military is little different from the rest of modern culture. If anything, the thinking we do about how computers have changed our practices and behaviors becomes even more pressing when we consider questions of war and defense.
• How do we, and how should we, think about computing and the use of force?
• For most purposes, the consideration of just war is divided into two parts:
• the legitimacy of the resort to force (jus ad bellum), ]
• and the rules governing the conduct of hostilities (jus in bello).
• The growth of the power of computing challenges us in both of these areas in different ways.

…

 

 

No QuEST Meeting this week, 7 Sept

There will be no meeting this week due to Cap’s travel commitments.  Have a great weekend and we will see everyone next week!