A New Class of Autopoietic and Cognitive Machines

Making computing machines mimic living organisms has captured the imagination of many since the dawn of digital computers. However, today’s artificial intelligence technologies fall short of replicating even the basic autopoietic and cognitive behaviors found in primitive biological systems. According to Charles Darwin, the difference in mind between humans and higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. Autopoiesis refers to the behavior of a system that replicates itself and maintains identity and stability while facing fluctuations caused by external influences. Cognitive behaviors model the system’s state, sense internal and external changes, analyze, predict and take action to mitigate any risk to its functional fulfillment. How did intelligence evolve? what is the relationship between the mind and body? Answers to these questions should guide us to infuse autopoietic and cognitive behaviors into digital machines. In this paper, we show how to use the structural machine to build a cognitive reasoning system that integrates the knowledge from various digital symbolic and sub-symbolic computations. This approach is analogous to how the neocortex repurposed the reptilian brain and paves the path for digital machines to mimic living organisms using an integrated knowledge representation from different sources.

Chapter 5. Answering Natural-Language Questions with Neuro-Symbolic Knowledge Bases

Symbolic reasoning systems based on first-order logics are computationally powerful, and feedforward neural networks are computationally efficient, so unless P=NP, neural networks cannot, in general, emulate symbolic logics. Hence bridging the gap between neural and symbolic methods requires achieving a delicate balance: one needs to incorporate just enough of symbolic reasoning to be useful for a task, but not so much as to cause computational intractability. In this chapter we first present results that make this claim precise, and then use these formal results to inform the choice of a neuro-symbolic knowledge-based reasoning system, based on a set-based dataflow query language. We then present experimental results with a number of variants of this neuro-symbolic reasoner, and also show that this neuro-symbolic reasoner can be closely integrated into modern neural language models.

How do Consumers’ Gender and Rational Thinking Affect the Acceptance of Entertainment Social Robots?

In recent years, the rapid ageing of the population, a longer life expectancy and elderly people’s desire to live independently are social changes that put pressure on healthcare systems. This context is boosting the demand for companion and entertainment social robots on the market and, consequently, producers and distributors are interested in knowing how these social robots are accepted by consumers. Based on technology acceptance models, a parsimonious model is proposed to estimate the intention to use this new advanced social robot technology and, in addition, an analysis is performed to determine how consumers’ gender and rational thinking condition the precedents of the intention to use. The results show that gender differences are more important than suggested by the literature. While women gave greater social influence and perceived enjoyment as the main motives for using a social robot, in contrast, men considered their perceived usefulness to be the principal reason and, as a differential argument, the ease of use. Regarding the reasoning system, the most significant differences occurred between heuristic individuals, who stated social influence as the main reason for using a robot, and the more rational consumers, who gave ease of use as a differential argument.

Validation of a Novel Predictive Algorithm for Kidney Failure in Patients Suffering from Chronic Kidney Disease: The Prognostic Reasoning System for Chronic Kidney Disease (PROGRES-CKD)

Current equation-based risk stratification algorithms for kidney failure (KF) may have limited applicability in real world settings, where missing information may impede their computation for a large share of patients, hampering one from taking full advantage of the wealth of information collected in electronic health records. To overcome such limitations, we trained and validated the Prognostic Reasoning System for Chronic Kidney Disease (PROGRES-CKD), a novel algorithm predicting end-stage kidney disease (ESKD). PROGRES-CKD is a naïve Bayes classifier predicting ESKD onset within 6 and 24 months in adult, stage 3-to-5 CKD patients. PROGRES-CKD trained on 17,775 CKD patients treated in the Fresenius Medical Care (FMC) NephroCare network. The algorithm was validated in a second independent FMC cohort (n = 6760) and in the German Chronic Kidney Disease (GCKD) study cohort (n = 4058). We contrasted PROGRES-CKD accuracy against the performance of the Kidney Failure Risk Equation (KFRE). Discrimination accuracy in the validation cohorts was excellent for both short-term (stage 4–5 CKD, FMC: AUC = 0.90, 95%CI 0.88–0.91; GCKD: AUC = 0.91, 95% CI 0.86–0.97) and long-term (stage 3–5 CKD, FMC: AUC = 0.85, 95%CI 0.83–0.88; GCKD: AUC = 0.85, 95%CI 0.83–0.88) forecasting horizons. The performance of PROGRES-CKD was non-inferior to KFRE for the 24-month horizon and proved more accurate for the 6-month horizon forecast in both validation cohorts. In the real world setting captured in the FMC validation cohort, PROGRES-CKD was computable for all patients, whereas KFRE could be computed for complete cases only (i.e., 30% and 16% of the cohort in 6- and 24-month horizons). PROGRES-CKD accurately predicts KF onset among CKD patients. Contrary to equation-based scores, PROGRES-CKD extends to patients with incomplete data and allows explicit assessment of prediction robustness in case of missing values. PROGRES-CKD may efficiently assist physicians’ prognostic reasoning in real-life applications.

Argumentation Reasoning with Graph Neural Networks for Reddit Conversation Analysis

The automated analysis of different trends in online debating forums is an interesting tool for sampling the agreement between citizens in different topics. In these online debating forums, users post different comments and answers to previous comments of other users. In previous work, we have defined computational models to measure different values in these online debating forums. A main ingredient in these models has been the identification of the set of winning posts trough an argumentation problem that characterizes this winning set trough a particular argumentation acceptance semantics. In the argumentation problem we first associate the online debate to analyze as a debate tree. Then, comments are divided in two groups, the ones that agree with the root comment of the debate, and the ones that disagree with it, and we extract a bipartite graph where the unique edges are the disagree edges between comments of the two different groups. Once we compute the set of winning posts, we compute the different measures we are interested to get from the debate, as functions defined over the bipartite graph and the set of winning posts. In this work, we propose to explore the use of graph neural networks to solve the problem of computing these measures, using as input the debate tree, instead of our previous argumentation reasoning system that works with the bipartite graph. We focus on the particular online debate forum Reddit, and on the computation of a measure of the polarization in the debate. Our results over a set of Reddit debates, show that graph neural networks can be used with them to compute the polarization measure with an acceptable error, even if the number of layers of the network is bounded by a constant.

Deliberative Agents in Dynamic Environments, Using Jason and NARS

This work explore the possibility to combine the Jason reasoning cycle with a Non-Axiomatic Reasoning System (NARS) to develop multi-agent systems that are able to reason, deliberate and plan when information about plans to be executed and goals to be pursued is missing or incomplete. The contribution of this work is a method for BDI agents to create high-level plans using an AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) system based on non-axiomatic logic.

Deliberative Agents in Dynamic Environments, Using Jason and NARS

This work explore the possibility to combine the Jason reasoning cycle with a Non-Axiomatic Reasoning System (NARS) to develop multi-agent systems that are able to reason, deliberate and plan when information about plans to be executed and goals to be pursued is missing or incomplete. The contribution of this work is a method for BDI agents to create high-level plans using an AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) system based on non-axiomatic logic.

Context Reasoning for Predicting Gestational Diabetes Mellitus Using CA-RETE Algorithm

Today, IoT-related applications play an important role in scientific world development. Context reasoning emphasizes the perception of various contexts by means of collection of IoT data which includes context-aware decision making. Context-aware computing is used to improve the abilities of smart devices and is increased by smart applications. In this paper, context-aware for the internet of things middleware (CAIM) architecture is used for developing a rule-based system using CA-RETE algorithm. The objective of context-aware systems are concentrated on 1) context reasoning methodologies and analyzing how the technologies will involve enhancing the high-level context data, 2) framework of context reasoning system, 3) implementation of CA-RETE algorithm for predicting gestational diabetes mellitus in healthcare applications.