COS623: Cognitive System Design (CS, Systems)

The goal of the course is to expose students to a comprehensive cross-section of the main elements of artificial cognitive systems. Inspired by artificial intelligence, developmental psychology, and cognitive neuroscience, our aim is to build systems that can act on their own to achieve goals: perceiving their environment, anticipating the need to act and the likely outcome of actions, learning from experience, adapting to changing circumstances, and interacting with humans. The course surveys the cognitivist, emergent, and hybrid paradigms of cognitive science and discusses cognitive architectures derived from them. Students will be guided through the main paradigms, modelling methods, and technologies involved in the design of cognitive artificial systems and will understand the theoretical and technical challenges involved in modelling and building systems that can reason, solve problems, acquire and use knowledge, make decisions. They will learn how and in which cases computational models can be used to help us in understanding human intelligence and in making progress towards more advanced AI systems. In this respect, the key issues of autonomy, embodiment, learning & development, memory, knowledge representation, decision making and evaluation are discussed. Concepts are introduced in an intuitive, natural order, with an emphasis on the relationships among ideas and building to an overview of the field, equipping students with sufficient knowledge and understanding to study specific topics in greater depth.