ABOUT CADIA
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CADIA is the first artificial intelligence (A.I.) laboratory in Iceland. We conduct research in various areas of intelligent agents, with a strong emphasis on interaction and real-time performance. Our past and present projects include topics such as planning, games, large-scale A.I. systems, robots, humanoids and agent-based modeling.

Our research facilities give students plenty of space, software and hardware to do advanced research in the core CADIA areas, which we frequently demonstrate publicly (photos in top row - picts 1-5: Vísindavakan, pict 6: AI Festival).

  • Agent Orientation. Our conceptualization of an intelligent agent follows closely the one proposed by the first president of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence Allen Newell who, (1980) in his initial presidential address, described an intelligent agent as consisting of cognitive faculties such as a perceptual system, memory system, processing system, motor system, and so on. One way to understand the implications of this definition is by contrasting it with an omnipresent intelligence. The key difference lies in the kind of information that the agent has access to at any given point in time: Agents have a sensory apparatus that limits what they can directly observe and a memory with restrictions such as access time and capacity. Having an agent-based focus means that mental models have limitations related to embodiment. Another important focus under this theme is situatedness: The nature of the world around the agent, how that world affects what the agent can know, how the agent understands the relationship between itself and the environment and how the agent changes with each interaction with this environment.

 

 
    • Realtime. We are interested in realtime so we basically want everything to run faster, right? Alas, if things were that simple we would probably not make this a special focus of our work. Realtime is not about speed alone, it is about the speed of one system relative to another system, in our case the speed of a thinking mind embedded in the real world. So for us realtime has to do with building systems that deal intelligently with time, meets deadlines and uses time wisely for planning, decision making and execution. Being realtime means taking time into considerations when making decisions and behaving in the world; it's a bout understanding your own limitations for solving problems and doing whatever it is that you do. At CADIA we look at the various issues tying together knowledge, time and situated behavior and how this dictates the mental architectures that we must build.

    • Virtual & Augmented Environments. Virtual worlds can serve at least two very important roles in A.I. One is that of a testbed: The real world is complicated; a virtual world can be used as a simplified version of the real world. Some virtual worlds are self-contained in themselves, as for example many board games. Other virtual worlds are fully-fledged social environments, such as massively multiplayer on-line games. Another aspect of virtual worlds is the one where all our information is presently moving: Cyberspace. Virtual environments provide the A.I. researcher with a lot of interesting possibilities for both innovative experiments and innovative applications.

    References

    Newell, A. (1980). The Knowledge Level. AI Magazine, Summer 1981.

 

 
CADIA
cadia@ru.is  |  Menntavegur 1, IS -101 Reykjavík
Tel: +354 510 6427  |  Fax: +354 510 6201