AASS Seminar - The role of narratives in human-centric AI

The research centre AASS arranges a seminar with Luc Steels, Catalan Institute for Advanced Studies, ICREA and Institute for Evolutionary Biology, UPF/CSIC, Barcelona.

Link to Zoom

Abstract

Human-centric AI requires not only a fundamental shift in the way AI systems are conceived and designed but also a reorientation in basic research. Many things need to be done but I argue that we more specifically need to figure out how AI can come to grips with meaning and understanding. Meanings categorize and conceptualize experiences and situations at different levels: from directly observable factual meanings to expressional, social, conventional and intrinsic meanings.

Meanings get organised into NARRATIVES that conceptualize experiences from particular perspectives. Understanding is the process of constructing and then integrating these narratives into a Personal Dynamic Memory that stores narratives from past experiences. This personal dynamic memory plays a crucial role to construct additional narratives and thus works intimately together with language processing, sensory-motor interactions, inferences, mental simulations and semantic memory. This paper outlines the role of narratives in human-centered AI and outlines some of the technical challenges that must be overcome.

Background

Steels, L. (2020) Personal Dynamic Memories are Necessary to Deal with Meaning and Understanding in Human-Centric AI. In: Saffiotti, A., L. Serafini, P. Lukowicz (eds) (2020) Proceedings of the First International Workshop on New Foundations for Human-Centered AI. CEUR. Vol-2659. pp. 11-16. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2659/steels.pdf