Blogging the Noosphere

Day 3

Attended John Laird’s plenary talk this morning titled “Is Cognitive Science the Right Method for AI”. John Laird is of course best known for his own cognitive architecture SOAR. I wonder, since John Anderson was invited, they had to, or someone insisted that John Laird also be invited for a plenary talk (or vise versa). Anyway, one quick thought. In general I am encouraged by so called Symbolic Cognitive Architectures in one sense, they are examples of integrative cognitive science, or studying complete cognitive agents and performance, not isolated cognitive functions. In general I believe this is a good thing to be doing for Cognitive Science. Of course, I have issues with their basic assumptions and approach, e.g. starting from a disembodied, symbolic, top-down framework and assumptions.

Bob Glushko made a remark in his Semantics in the Wild seminar that this kind of research (presented in this symposium, tagging & social network systems) hasn’t been seen in cognitive science before. If true the Cognitve Science Society as a whole is a bit behind the curve. Though I might disagree a bit. I do know of at least some very good research by Psychologists / Cognitive Scientists into social networking systems in general. Especially phenomena like Facebook and Myspace, and relations to teen development, culture, etc. Kind of a new type of sociology / anthropology for the technology age. (Though I’m blanking on the 1 or 2 top names I’ve heard of doing this stuff.) But admittedly this symposium’s topic is a bit different. It is looking at semantic tagging in such social systems, and how they naturally evolve (and self-organize), and relation to natural human categorization and concept formation. Some interesting stuff. Especially if you, like me, find this whole idea of leveraging crowd intelligence from social intelligence, a type of borganism concept (a term coined by Charlie Stross I believe).

I thought that Jeff Elman gave an excellent talk in his 2007 Rumelhart Prize Plenary address. His receiving of the prize is richly deserved.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS