Category: Information Technology
-
Linking fast and slow
“Linking fast and slow: The case for generative models” A pervasive challenge in neuroscience is testing whether neuronal connectivity changes over time due to specific causes, such as stimuli, events, or clinical interventions. Recent hardware innovations and falling data storage costs enable longer, more naturalistic neuronal recordings. The implicit opportunity for understanding the self-organised brain…
-
Robust Decision-Making Via Free Energy Minimization
“Robust Decision-Making Via Free Energy Minimization” html, pdf, video, Nature Communications Despite their groundbreaking performance, state-of-the-art autonomous agents can misbehave when training and environmental conditions become inconsistent, with minor mismatches leading to undesirable behaviors or even catastrophic failures. Robustness towards these training/environment ambiguities is a core requirement for intelligent agents and its fulfillment is a…
-
Boredom and curiosity – information
“Boredom and curiosity: the hunger and the appetite for information“ Boredom and curiosity are common everyday states that drive individuals to seek information. Due to their functional relatedness, it is not trivial to distinguish whether an action, for instance in the context of a behavioral experiment, is driven by boredom or curiosity. Are the two…
-
The Universe Learning Itself
“The Universe Learning Itself: On the Evolution of Dynamics from theBig Bang to Machine Intelligence” We develop a unified, dynamical-systems narrative of the universe that traces a continuous chain of structure formation from the Big Bang to contemporary human societies and their artificial learning systems. Rather than treating cosmology, astrophysics, geophysics, biology, cognition, and machine…
-
Statistics is not measurement
“Statistics is not measurement: The inbuilt semantics of psychometric scales and language-based models obscures crucial epistemic differences” This article provides a comprehensive critique of psychology’s overreliance on statistical modelling at the expense of epistemologically grounded measurement processes. It highlights that statistics deals with structural relations in data regardless of what these data represent, whereas measurement…
-
Why collective behavioursself-organize to criticality
“Why collective behaviours self-organize to criticality: a primer on information-theoretic and thermodynamic utility measures” Collective behaviours are frequently observed to self‑organize to criticality. Existing proposals to explain these phenomena are fragmented across disciplines and only partially answer the question. This primer compares the underlying, intrinsic, utilities that may explain the self‑organization of collective behaviours near…
-
Fast, slow, & metacognitive
“Fast, slow, and metacognitive thinking in AI” Inspired by the ”thinking fast and slow” cognitive theory of human decision making, we propose a multi-agent cognitive architecture (SOFAI) that is based on ”fast”/”slow” solvers and a metacognitive module. We then present experimental results on the behavior of an instance of this architecture for AI systems that…
-
Computational Framework for cognitive biology
“Toward a computational framework for cognitive biology: Unifying approaches from cognitive neuroscience and comparative cognition” Progress in understanding cognition requires a quantitative, theoretical framework, grounded in the other natural sciences and able to bridge between implementational, algorithmic and computational levels of explanation. This review article reviews recent results in neuroscience and cognitive biology that, when combined, provide key components…
-
Towards embodied intelligence
“Intelligent soft matter: towards embodied intelligence” Intelligent soft matter lies at the intersection of materials science, physics, and cognitive science, promising to change how we design and interact with materials. This transformative field aims to create materials with life-like capabilities, such as perception, learning, memory, and adaptive behavior. Unlike traditional materials, which typically perform static…
-
Complexity data science
“Complexity data science: A spin-off from digital twins “ Digital twins offer a new and exciting framework that has recently attracted significant interest in fields such as oncology, immunology, and cardiology. The basic idea of a digital twin is to combine simulation and learning to create a virtual model of a physical object. In this paper,…
-
The power of mathematical models for better policy decisions
“Harnessing the power of mathematical models for better policy decisions” sets out four practical recommendations to help policymakers across a wide range of policy areas effectively capitalise on, and sidestep pitfalls of, using mathematical models for decision-making. Decision-makers are often keen to “follow the science” in highly-charged contexts such as climate policy, pandemic response, economic…
-
Power of the Invisible
“The Power of the Invisible: The Quantessence of Reality” from Sander Bais There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you’ve made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you’ve made a discovery. Enrico Fermi Quantum Physics is the solid basis of most of our understanding of…
-
A Drive to Survive
“A Drive to Survive: The Free Energy Principle and the Meaning of Life“ How the purposive behavior of living systems outstrips the constraints of the free energy principle. Since 2005, Karl Friston’s proposal that the principle of free energy minimization underpins the purposive behavior of living agents has evolved through thousands of publications. This principle’s central…
-
Defining intelligence: Bridging the gap
“Defining intelligence: Bridging the gap between human and artificial perspectives“ Achieving a widely accepted definition of human intelligence has been challenging, a situation mirrored by the diverse definitions of artificial intelligence in computer science. By critically examining published definitions, highlighting both consistencies and inconsistencies, this paper proposes a refined nomenclature that harmonizes conceptualizations across the two disciplines.…
-
Is Ockham’s razor losing its edge?
Is Ockham’s razor losing its edge? New perspectives on the principle of model parsimony The preference for simple explanations, known as the parsimony principle, has long guided the development of scientific theories, hypotheses, and models. Yet recent years have seen a number of successes in employing highly complex models for scientific inquiry (e.g., for 3D…
-
A hidden Gem – Residuality
Software architecture for a rapidly changing world – with Barry O’Reilly describes the marvelous journey of Residues as an ‘Antifragile’ Software Architecture decision process (but also scalable to solution and Enterprise Architecture) Residuality theory is a revolutionary new theory of software design that aims to make it easier to design software systems for complex business…
-
Energy cost of computation: stochastic thermodynamics?
“Is stochastic thermodynamics the key to understanding the energy costs of computation?” The relationship between the thermodynamic and computational properties of physical systems has been a major theoretical interest since at least the 19th century. It has also become of increasing practical importance over the last half-century as the energetic cost of digital devices has…
Surtil : 