RAIR Lab Director Selmer Bringsjord has been awarded the Covey Award, which is presented to senior scholars with a substantial record of innovative research in the field of computing and philosophy broadly conceived. He presented his award lecture, “Two Refutations of Hegemonic Bayesianism,” at the IACAP 2014 conference in Thessaloniki, Greece.
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“By Disanalogy, Cyberwarfare is Utterly New” (video)
Talk by Selmer Bringsjord on “By Disanalogy, Cyberwarfare is Utterly New.” Given at the Workshop on Ethics of Cyber Conflict.
“On Deep Computational Formalization of Natural Language” (video)
John Licato gives a talk “On Deep Computational Formalization of Natural Language” at the FORMAL Magic workshop at the Sixth Conference on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI-13) in Beijing (http://www.agi-conference.org/2013).
“Making Watson Smarter: From Deep QA to Dynamic QA” (video)
IBM sent Watson to RPI for some education. Part of this education includes the attempt to graduate Watson from mere Deep QA (which sufficed for Jeopardy!) to what we call Dynamic QA. In the former, a computing machine answers questions by merely retrieving answers that are pre-recorded in old data. No one can graduate from college on the strength of providing such answers. In the latter, a computing machine reasons and discovers and problem-solves in real-time, on the spot; this kind of capability earns one a college degree. Some demonstrations involving the robot Baby Watson are provided, and the talk includes elements of prior work devoted to divining what Watson and its successors really are, mathematically speaking.
“AI, Economics, MOOCs, and…the Fast-and-Furious Future of Higher Education” (video)
Lecture by Selmer Bringsjord et al. on “AI, Economics, MOOCs, and…the Fast-and-Furious Future of Higher Education.”
Naveen Sundar G.: “Uncomputable Games: Toward Crowd-sourced Solving of Truly Difficult Problems” (video)
Selmer Bringsjord: “Toward a Formal Definition of Evil” (video)
Abstract:
A computer, however powerful, doesn’t much like English (or for that matter any other natural language). (To prove this, try talking to your computer the way you might to a colleague. In point of fact, your computer, as of 2009, no matter what software is running upon it, can’t even handle the English you would use to communicate efficiently with a neurobiologically normal toddler.) Given my desire to impart to a machine the concept of pure, unadulterated evil, this means that I need to give to the machine a definition of evil that it *can* understand: I need to give it a *formal* definition. I report in this talk on my longstanding effort to craft this definition, and on two synthetic characters (E and Arnie) intended to possibly instantiate it, and therefore to themselves possibly be evil. You may have read about E in the media; you haven’t heard about Arnie. Arnie is a rather unsavory chap who arguably makes even the darker characters in *24* seem luminous by comparison, and who appears among other places in the play *Calculi of Death*, a pre-publication & pre-performance version of which is available at: