My upcoming presentation

I will be giving a presentation in the next few days on my work so far. It is always good to do these presentations as they help me to polish my thoughts to a point where they might be intelligible to other people. Here is my title and abstract.

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A presentation on evolutionary emergent intelligence and communication in a society of virtually embodied agents

One of the goals of AI research is to develop an AI with human level language abilities. Such an AI may be useful for tasks such as language translation and human-computer interaction. A more powerful application may be for an AI to learn from indirect experience via text and to modify its own knowledge base.

One of the fundamental issues AI researchers face is how develop rules to guide appropriate behaviour in situations that are not well defined. These rules need to guide an AI that is disembodied, alien and not in situations. Such an AI needs to have rules guiding what is relevant to determine a context but it requires a context to determine what is relevant.

These issues relate to certain assumptions in AI research. Two of the main assumptions are that all knowledge may be formalised and that some knowledge is invariable. If these assumptions lead to these issues, what are some alternative assumptions?

AI literature has suggested that an alternative approach is to embody, motivate and situate AI programs. This presentation will discuss these different perspectives as well as work in this area and some research questions.

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In the field of AI, that which researchers know how to develop may strongly influence what they prefer to research. That is fair enough. However, this may lead to differing opinions regarding different goals and methodologies.

For this reason, a lot of what I am doing and the reason for my long abstract is that I need to carefully explain and put what I am doing in context. I find that it helps to imagine that my research is a story with a narrative running through to link up all the areas and to provide a bridge for my audience to access my work.