[alife] Second CFP - AAAI Spring Symposium - Implementing Selves with Safe Motivational Systems & Self-Improvement

[Mark Waser]

Hopefully this isn't too far off topic . . . . 


AAAI Spring 2014 Symposium - March 24-26, 2014 / Stanford University, Palo
Alto, California, USA


Implementing Selves with Safe Motivational Systems & Self-Improvement


Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) most
often focus on tools for collecting knowledge and solving problems or
achieving goals rather than self-reflecting entities. Instead, this
implementation-oriented symposium will focus on guided self-creation and
improvement - particularly as a method of achieving human-level intelligence
in machines through iterative improvement ("seed AI").

In I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter argues that the key to
understanding selves is the "strange loop", a complex feedback network
inhabiting our brains and, arguably, constituting our minds. Further, humans
have both conscious and unconscious minds (Daniel Kahneman's system one and
system two), attention, emotions, partial self-reflection, a moral sense and
many other aspects that are rarely addressed - yet seem critical for the
creation of a safe self-sufficient autonomous system.

This symposium will focus on the integration of these components into a
coherent self-improving self. Ideally, the ultimate end product will be a
successful entity with extensive self-knowledge and a safe or moral/ethical
motivational system that functions with context/ecologically sensitive
egoistic/altruistic discrimination to promote cooperation with and
contribution to community via iterative improvement of self, tools and
theoretical constructs of relational dynamics and resource utilization,
allocation and sharing.

This symposium is proposed as an implementation-oriented exploration of
self, to include:

*	integrative architectures with explicit motivations 

*	implementing "self" as operating system with "plug-ins"
*	implementing "self" as society (of mind - Marvin Minsky)
*	implementing "self" as economy (of idiots - Eric Baum)
*	implementing "self" as global workspace/consciousness
(Baars/Franklin)
*	implementing "self" as authorship (Dennett, Wegner)

*	"safe" and/or "moral" and ethical motivational systems 

*	value sets vs. goal hierarchies
*	context/ecological sensitivity
*	"safe"/moral values/goal content
*	evaluation schemes

*	reflection 

*	self-examination
*	self-modeling & self-knowledge
*	goal-based self-evaluation for self-improvement

*	attention & emotions 

*	as interoceptive responses to environmental stimuli
*	as knowledge/rules of thumb/"actionable qualia"
*	as helpful & unhelpful biases (and how to intelligently improve)
*	as evaluation & enforcement mechanisms

*	integrating different knowledge and action representation schemes 

*	coordination & translation between various schemes
*	analyzing trade-offs & knowing when to switch between schemes

*	self-improvement 

*	via automated tool/method incorporation & theory-inductive
heuristics 

*	goal-based tool/method discovery
*	tool/method integration and evaluation
*	tool-to-theory heuristics

*	via learning (knowledge incorporation) 

*	(re-)building schemes and models

*	discovery (refactoring, modularization, encapsulation and
scale-invariance) 

*	theory-to-tool heuristics
*	automated (re-)construction of probabilistic graphical models
*	Meta-Optimizing Semantic Evolutionary Search (MOSES)
*	Frequent & Interesting Sub-HyperGRAph Mining (FISHGRAM)

While solutions need to be grounded and extensible, the symposium would
prefer approaches starting with some initial structure rather than a tabula
rasa with the lowest level bootstrapping approaches or first causes
explanations (except where they are fully extended to initial structures
and/or used to justify such structures). Also, while autopoiesis and
"functional consciousness" are obviously key topics, we would prefer that
phenomenal consciousness arguments be considered off-topic.


Submissions


Those interested in participating should submit either full-length papers
(up to 6 pages in AAAI format) or short papers/extended abstracts (2-3
pages) to https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ss14self. Submissions
are due October 4.


Additional Information


Additional conference information is available at the AAAI Spring 2014
Symposium page <http://www.aaai.org/Symposia/Spring/sss14.php> .  More
details will be posted here as they become available.  Questions can be
emailed to Mark Waser (MWaser at DigitalWisdomInstitute.org
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