Transcript Artificial Intelligence: Brute Force and Insight

Grand Challenge: Memories for Life
Nigel Shadbolt and Wendy Hall
The University of Southampton
And Where is Wendy Hall?
Structure
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What is a Grand Challenge?
History of the M4L GC
The phenomena of memory
The science of memory
The technology of memory
Application Opportunities
Issues
– Ethical
– Funding
– Collaboration
What is a Grand Challenge?
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Revolutionary shift in thinking or practice
Enthusiastic support from scientific communities
Appeals to the public imagination
A clear criterion for success or failure
Long term benefits to science, industry, society
International scope
Interdisciplinary, collaborative research
Examplars…
Grand Challenges
• Put a man on the moon
within a decade
• Map the human genome
• Build a computer to beat
the world chess champion
Memories for Life Grand
Challenge
• Part of the UKCRC/EPSRC sponsored Grand
Challenges for Computer Science Research –
November 2002 Workshop
• Surfaced as a topic again during the Foresight
Cognitive Systems Workshops
• Submitted a proposal to hold a planning event to
Foresight – held London mid August
• Why the interest?
Memories are Compelling
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We are quite literally our memories
They are both personal and social
They exist in all modalities
Pervasive and central in all walks of life
What is your first memory?
Do you remember you first day at school?
Do you remember the first time you hurt your
sibling?
• Are they real or constructed?
• Are they lost, diminished or overlaid?
Wendy’s Life Bits
Memories: Shared and Private
• Certain events as memories evoke time and
place with exquisite clarity
The scale of evocation
• Some are global flash bulb memories others
are national and many are personal
Memories and Science Fiction
The Science of Memory
• Memory – recognition of multiple systems
• Working and Short Term Memory
– Multi–component; e.g auditory/verbal STM,
visual/spatial LTM
• Long Term Memory
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Episodic
Semantic
Procedural
Recognition
Value
When did you last ride a bicycle?
What is a bicycle?
How do you ride a bicycle?
Is this a bicycle?
Phobic to bicycles?
The Psychology of Memory:
Exemplar Differences
Episodic Memory:
Semantic Memory:
Reference is to oneself
Organised temporally
Events remembered
“consciously”
Susceptible to forgetting
Context dependent
Reference is with respect
to general knowledge
Not organised temporally
Events are “known”
Relatively permanent
Context independent
Shacter’s Seven “Sins” of Memory
Transience
Weakening or loss of memory over time
Absent-mindedness
Breakdown between attention and memory
Blocking
Failure to retrieve
Misattribution
Incorrect provenance
Suggestibility
Reconstruction and reinterpretation
Bias
Misrepresentation of memory
Persistence
Inability to suppress or remove memory
The Locus of Memory
Mechanisms for Memory: LTP
Memories and Plasticity
• Neurons send out axons to
synapse with targets
• Once established targets
supply neurotrophic (NT)
factors
• These factors are essential
to the continued survival of
innervating neurons
• If a neuron receives too
little factor it dies
• Target innervation and
neuronal elimination are
adaptive mechanisms
Model of Plasticity
Assumption – time average uptake of NTF by i from x
determines the number of synapses projected by i to x
Applied in silico to development of a variety of cortical maps
T. Elliott and N.R. Shadbolt. Developmental robotics: Manifesto and
application." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London,
Series A. In the press.
Koala Experiments
Memories for Life: The Dix
Measure
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70 years ~ 25,550 days, 613,00 hours, 2.2x109 secs
100 kbits/sec for audio/video
27.5 terabytes for a life
343 80 gigabyte hard drives
2 years ~ 60 million seconds of data ~ 6 hard drives
2073 storage capacity could have doubled 47 times
Capacities could have increased 12 orders of magnitude
Your life on a grain of sand!
Memories for Life: The
Computing Power
Memories for Life: The
Hardware
• Fujitsu - .8 inch 80 gigabyte
hard drive
• Video cameras
• Video transmitter
• Complete PC
• Other modalities e.g smell
Memories for Life: The
Computer Science
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Database Systems
Security
Operating Systems and Versioning,
Persistence of format, re-represenations
Artificial Intelligence
Human Computer Interaction
Visualisation and Virtual Reality
Memories for Life and
Information Overload
We are drowning in
information and starving
for knowledge
Infosmog: The condition
of having too much
information to be able to
take effective action or
make an informed
decision
The deluge of data is
overwhelming
Ontologies: Shared Conceptualisations
Automatic Annotation
• Associating meta-data with content
• Large-scale annotation of natural language
texts, images, streaming media
Narrative Generation
• Using NLP, structure generating and linking
techniques to build narratives
Associative Linking
• Supporting multiple context or associative
indexes into content
Web and Grid Services
• Seamless access to computationally
intensive services – image registration,
annotation, classification…
The Perfect Storm
• Convergence of at least three disciplines
– Neuroscience and psychology
– Device engineering
– Computer Science
• Potential to create a truly remarkable range
of applications
Memories for Life: Application
Contexts
• Multimedia Searching
• Large Scale Experience Repositories
– (e.g Big Brother, early child interactions….)
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Continuous health record
Stories from a Life
Intelligent Mathematics Tutor
Memory support in Elder Care
Virtual Memories
Lest we forget
• The the nature and role of forgetting in
natural and artificial systems
• The desirability of post-mortem memories
• The way in which these memory prostheses
and the externalisation of memory will
change social practice
• Memory is a social and cultural construct
Other efforts
• Xanadu – Ted Nelson
• MyLifeBits – Gordon Bell@Microsoft
• LifeLog – DARPA
Ethical Issues
• Ethical
– Privacy
– Trust
Future Events
• M4L London August 20th
• IAC Bristol
• Follow up workshop primarily life science based
CS early 2004
• Primarily CS workshop at March BCS Grand
Challenges in Computing 04 Newcastle
• End of 2004 CS and Life Science International
Workshop
Summary
• This is a compelling Grand Challenge
• We have enthusiastic engagement of researchers
and Learned Societies - BCS/IEE/BNA/EPS
• Like to seek RCUK funding for network support
• Support for large scale experience repositories
• All communities stand to gain
– Common problem space – fundamental science etc
– Richness/availability of data, technology and methods
will support/mediate interaction
• Ethical and social issues must be considered