--------------------------------------------------- | | | UNDERSTANDING UNDERSTANDING WORKSHOP | | Workshop @ AGI-17 | | | | August 18, 2017, in Melbourne, Australia | | | | http://cadia.ru.is/workshops/uuw2017/ | | | | Contact: david.kremelberg@gmail.com | | | --------------------------------------------------- Understanding Understanding will be a one-day workshop addressing recent work relevant to the question of machine understanding, aiming for a wide range of topics and methods to be presented and discussed. To explore the natural questions inherent within this concept the workshop aims to draw on the fields of AI, AGI, philosophy, cognitive science and psychology to cover a diverse set of methods, assumptions, approaches, and systems design and thinking in the field of AI and AGI. Understanding seems central to the human ability to assess our own capacity for affecting change in particular contexts on particular tasks. Historically, the use of the term understanding in AI has mostly focused on natural language, which relates to the parsing and manipulation of linguistic tokens, and scene or image understanding, which again relates to parsing or largely semantics-free processing, with any discussion of understanding proper a rare occurrence. To the field of AGI, for which the topic of generality is central, this state of affairs would seem far from ideal. Investigating the phenomenon of understanding, comparing systems with respect to their potential for understanding, and getting to the crux of what understanding really is, seems of significant importance to the field. We are interested in submissions from the fields on AGI, AI, psychology, and philosophy, which focus upon the concept of understanding, especially in relation to the goal of building machines that have the capacity to understand. Among the questions and topics the workshop will address (but is not limited to) are the following: • How should we define understanding? • How can we test for understanding? • Is understanding an emergent property of intelligent systems? • Is understanding a central property of intelligent systems? • What are the typologies or gradations of understanding? • How can we create systems that exhibit understanding? • What is required in order to achieve understanding in machines? • Can understanding be achieved through hand-crafted architectures or must it emerge through self-organizing (constructivist) principles? • How can mainstream techniques be used towards the development of machines which exhibit understanding? • Do we need radically different approaches than those in use today to build systems with understanding? • Does building artificially intelligent machines with versus without understanding depend on the same underlying principles, or are these orthogonal approaches? • Do we need special programming languages to implement understanding in intelligent systems? • Is general intelligence necessary and/or sufficient to achieve understanding in an artificial system? • What differentiates systems that do and do not have understanding? • How can current state of the art methods in AGI address the need for understanding in machines? Parties interested specifically in this workshop will be able to register for this one-day workshop without having to register for the entire AGI-17 conference. We welcome technical papers as well as overviews, demonstrations and position papers on a range of topics relating to the topic of understanding: • Design proposals for cognitive architectures targeting understanding • New programming languages relevant to understanding • New methods relevant to understanding • New architectural principles relevant to understanding • New theoretical insights relevant to understanding • Synergies between various approaches to understanding (theoretically, within AGI, etc.) • Machine education/learning needed to achieve understanding • Analysis of the potential and limitations of existing approaches Papers should be between 2 and 12 pages and describe the authors' original work. Formatting can follow either the AGI-17 format or the IJCAI-17 format. Papers will be subjected to peer-review and can be accepted for oral presentation or poster presentation. Proposals for Demonstrations should be accompanied with a 2-page extended abstract for inclusion in the workshop's proceedings. Examples include, but are not limited to: (interactively) demonstrating the performance of a system, (cognitive) architecture, or design methodology. Oral presentations should be given by one of the authors during one of the Contributed Talks Sessions. Posters and demonstrations will be presented during the Poster & Demo Session at the end of the day. Accepted papers will be gathered into a volume of proceedings and published online. Contributions should be submitted through EasyChair (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=agi17uuw) before the deadline on July 10th (23:59 Eastern time). Authors will be notified on July 25th of the acceptance or rejection of their submission, and are requested to submit a revised camera-ready version based on reviewers' comments by August 5th. Please refer to our website for detailed information on how to submit a paper: http://cadia.ru.is/workshops/uuw2017/ ------------- | Key Dates | ------------- * Due date: July 10 * Notification date: July 25 * Camera-ready date: Aug 5 ---------------- | Organization | ---------------- * David Kremelberg Icelandic Institute for Intelligent Machines, Iceland * Kristinn R. Thorisson Reykjavik University & Icelandic Institute for Intelligent Machines, Iceland * Pei Wang Temple University, U.S.A. * Bas Steunebrink NNAISENSE, Switzerland