Universität Bielefeld - Sonderforschungsbereich 360
"Conscious" Agents: Imitating Minds in Software
Institute for Intelligent Systems
The University of Memphis
Friday, March 5th, 1999
12 c.t. Uhr, Hörsaal 9
Baars global workspace theory (1988, 1997) provides a functional
psychological model of human consciousness and cognition. "Conscious"
software agents are intelligent autonomous agents that implement and flesh out
that theory, specifying mechanisms for the various functions. Such
"conscious" agents can provide hypotheses to cognitive scientists and
neuroscientists. Given a question about an issue in human cognition, one
looks to see how it works in the agents. The hypothesis, which may or may not
be correct, is that it works the same way in humans.
Here I'll describe two such "conscious" agents, one a clerical agent
operating in a narrow domain, the other a human-like information agent "living" in
a complex, dynamic environment. Ill briefly touch on several of their modules
and their mechanisms, including perception, action selection, memory, emotion,
learning, deliberation, language generation and metacognition.
Anke Weinberger, 1999-02-25