== WDL Dis #2 ============================================

 Re: Our WDL will start a revolution?
 Date: Sat, 12 Feb 2000 13:42:00 +0000
 From: Stan Franklin <franklin@memphis.edu>
 Reply-To: stan.franklin@memphis.edu
 Organization: University of Memphis
 To: Dr John J Weng <weng@cse.msu.edu>

John,

> Off-line spoon-fed machine learning is popular in AI.
> Does this mode allow sufficient grounding?

I think not, and propose that the most useful AI venue for both cognitive
modeling and for producing human-like systems is that of an autonomous agent.

An autonomous agent is a system situated within and a part of an environment
that senses that environment and acts on it, over
time, in pursuit of its own agenda and so as to effect what it senses in the
future. http://www.msci.memphis.edu/~franklin/AgentProg.html

> Further, neuroscientists will report their new foundlings that
> are probably shocking to AI/robotics guys:  Rewiring of vision signals
> to auditory cortex in animals and then the animals can be trained to do
> vision tasks (yes, using auditory cortex)!
> Why are most our machine guys have a hard time using very different
> methods for vision and speech while our brain does them successfully
> under general self-organization principles?  What are these
> self-organization principles?

I certainly don't know. But, I suspect they'll come out of the kind of
dynamical systems approach to recognition pioneered by Walter Freeman in
olfaction in rabbits and extended in his recent *How Brains Make Up Their
Minds* .

Stan

--
Stan Franklin
Math Sciences Dept  Phone: (901) 678-3142
Univ of Memphis      Fax:   (901) 678-2480
Memphis, TN 38152  stan.franklin@memphis.edu
USA            www.msci.memphis.edu/~franklin