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Dissertation Defense

WHAT:
Push Singh:
"EM-ONE: An Architecture for Reflective Commonsense Thinking"

WHEN:
Friday, April 29, 2005, 11:00 AM EST

WHERE:
Bartos Theatre, MIT Media Lab (E15)

WEBCAST:
tv icon http://www.media.mit.edu/events/movies/video.php?id=push-2005-04-29
The link will become active on the date and time scheduled for this event.

DISSERTATION COMMITTEE:
Marvin Minsky
Emeritus Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
MIT Media Laboratory

Aaron Sloman
Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science
School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, UK

Gerald Sussman
Matsushita Professor of Electrical Engineering
MIT CSAIL

ABSTRACT:
Singh will present EM-ONE, an architecture for commonsense thinking capable of reflective reasoning about situations involving physical, social, and mental dimensions. EM-ONE uses as its knowledge base a library of commonsense narratives, each describing the physical, social, and mental activity that occurs during an interaction between several actors. EM-ONE reasons with these narratives by applying "mental critics," procedures that debug problems that exist in the outside world or within EM-ONE itself. Mental critics draw upon commonsense narratives to suggest courses of action, methods for deliberating about the circumstances and consequences of those actions, and—when things go wrong—ways to reflect upon and debug the activity of previously invoked mental critics. The selection of mental critics is itself guided by a separate collection of meta-level critics that recognize what overall problem-type presently confronts the system.

EM-ONE was developed and tested within an artificial life domain, where simulated robotic actors face concrete physical and social problems. A detailed scenario is presented where EM-ONE enables two such actors to work together to build a table by engaging reactive, deliberative, and reflective processes operating across the physical, social, and mental realms.


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