Affect in Artificial Intelligence

I just came across this discussion forum this evening. In fact, I came across the whole Tomkins / Nathanson scene on the Web just yesterday evening! I'm finding it very interesting, both intellectually and as it relates to my own life.

I want to pass on a pointer to a symposium that some people here might find interesting. It's in the field of artificial intelligence, so it might seem far afield, but I imagine there may be a great opportunity for synergy here. The Symposium is entitled "Emotional and Intelligent: The Tangled Knot of Cognition", and is part of the fall symposium series of the AAAI, the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. It happens October 23-25 (a week after the Tomkins Institute Annual Colloquium, I notice!), in Orlando, FL. Here's the Web link:

http://arti.vub.ac.be/~lola/ei-fs98.html

I am a Ph.D. candidate in a program called Computation and Neural Systems, at Caltech in Pasadena CA. We study neuroscience from both the basic science end (neurobiology, especially neurophysiology) and the synthetic end (building artificial systems, motivated from things we've learned from neurobiology).

One of the central metaconcepts in my community is that the analytic and synthetic perspectives have a lot to teach each other. Sometimes we learn the most about how the nervous system works when we actually try to go out and build a nervous system! (Well, okay, a very very small and simple model of a small part of the nervous system.) And conversely, the engineers in my community take a lot of their basic approaches and tricks from what we've learned about how the brain works.

It is my hope that there could be a similar synergy between some of the folks in this forum, who study affect both from the psychological and the biological perspectives, and the folks in artificial intelligence who are now realizing that they need to bring emotion into the systems they construct.

Sincerely, David Kewley

• Artificial Stupidity by Don Nathanson, 3/28/98
  • Building a model of innate affect by David Kewley, 3/28/98
    • Stimulus Density by Don Nathanson, 3/28/98
      • References? by David Kewley, 3/29/98
        • Further connections by Don Nathanson, 3/29/98
    • Late to this discussion but.. by mark@emotivate.com, 2/8/99