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The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence presented the 2007 Fall Symposium Series on Friday through Sunday, November 9-11, at the Westin Arlington Gateway, Arlington, Virginia. The titles of the seven symposia were (1) AI and Consciousness: Theoretical Foundations and Current Approaches, (2) Artificial Intelligence for Prognostics, (3) Cognitive Approaches to Natural Language Processing, (4) Computational Approaches to Representation Change during Learning and Development, (5) Emergent Agents and Socialities: Social and Organizational Aspects of Intelligence, (6) Intelligent Narrative Technologies, and (7) Regarding the "Intelligence" in Distributed Intelligent Systems.
AI and Consciousness: Theoretical Foundations and Current Approaches
Is it possible to build a conscious machine? Is trying to design and build a conscious machine helpful to understanding the nature of consciousness? These questions have been at the core of AI since its beginnings. Recently there was an upsurge of interest in whether AI could address the issue of consciousness.
The primary goal of the symposium was to bring together experts from different disciplines who were interested in the relationships between AI and consciousness. The symposium was the first official place where scholars- coming from different fields as far as neuroscience and philosophy, psychology and computer science-addressed the issue of consciousness in a traditional AI environment. Furthermore, there was a good balance of American and European participants. The participants' talks centered on the topic of the symposium and generated lively discussions of their research. Talks were balanced between implementation aspects and theoretical issues. The adopted relaxed scheduling let everybody present his or her own idea in a clear and pleasant way.
The symposium included two invited talks. The first talk, given by Giulio Tononi (University of Wisconsin- Madison School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry), focused on an insightful theory of integrated information as the foundation of conscious experience. The second talk, given by Aaron Sloman (University of Birmingham, School of Computer Science), summarized many crucial issues in the understanding of AI research inspired by the study of consciousness.
There was an almost generally accepted consensus among symposium participants on the following issues: (1) consciousness can be a source of inspiration for building better (more adaptive, more robust, more autonomous, more resilient) AI systems; (2) building AI systems aspiring to consciousness could be a testbed for...