Back from Boston (@ MIT) for the BICA Conference

Tornato da Boston, dove sono stato per la conferenza BICA 2014, in cui ho presentato un articolo su aspetti abbastanza nuovi del mio lavoro di ricerca (in cui sto cercando di integrare il lavoro svolto in ambito rappresentazione della conoscenza con il settore delle architetture cognitive). Sono molto contento di essere stato qui.

BICA e' una conferenza molto stimolante e quest'anno si è tenuta al MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), una sorta di "tempio sacro" nel settore dell'Intelligenza Artificiale.
Finito il talk ho avuto la possibilità, nei giorni successivi, di visitare anche Harvard (praticamente attaccata al posto in cui si è svolta la conferenza). Fantastica esperienza: ho imparato tante cose e avuto moltissime occasioni di confronto con gli altri partecipanti (tra cui il leggendario Patrick Winston e il fisico Max Tegmark).

Obstacles to human level - AI development (from Mc Carthy)

"The computer science world is still suffering from a 1990s fit of pseudo-practicality that is inimical to the solution of difficult scientific problems. Lip service is given to basic research, and a lot of basic research is done, but the initiation of ambitious research by young people is hampered by the now prevalent doctrine that “basic research” should be done in connection with applied problems that have been identified by the competent committees. I think that Newell and Minsky and I would have had a much harder time initiating AI research if the atmosphere of the 1950s had been like that of the 1990s. Computer science suffers more than older fields from this disease, one of the main carriers of which was the Com- puter Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council. Its worst sin was merging computer science with computer engineering in its harmful, narrow-minded report Computing the Future [30].Nevertheless, the main problem in reaching human level AI is not the politics of science and technology but the intrinsic difficulty of the scientific problems". [30] C. Science, N.R.C. Telecommunications Board, Computing the Future: A Broader Agenda for Computer Science and Engineering, National Academies Press, 1992. From: Mc Carthy, John, From here to human-level AI, Artificial Intelligence, 171 (2007) 1174–1182