POV – Cognitive Systems: Science, Management, Engineering, Design & Arts, Public Policy

The fields of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science are arguably two of the newer academic disciplines, barely older than Computer Science which is still a few decades short of its centennial.

As academics and practitioners of these young fields convene several themes will surely emerge:

First, the progress to date, false steps, and history of many sub-fields will need to be reviewed.
– natural language processing, machine learning, pattern recognition, planning, robotics, knowledge representation and reasoning, expert systems, knowledge engineering environments

Second, the grand challenges for the coming decades, and what breakthroughs as well as incremental progress is likely in store.
– task performance benchmarking (both human and super-human), human and organizational augmentation, bootstrapping and compression of all knowledge, rapidly rebuilding societal systems

Third, reflections on the methodologies for making progress, strengthening the scientific foundation and opportunities for a deeper integration
– logics and mathematical foundations, data sets and corpora, new hardware and software architectures, new areas of application, new and changed professions

Last, but not least, the broader societal implications of this work will likely be highlighted.
– public policy, equity, accelerated change, security and defense, humanities and arts, ongoing transformation of industries

I have begun assembling a few pointers to augmented intelligence grand challenges.  I suspect there is a shift underway .  The discipline of cognitive systems is shifting from a focus on individuals to collectives, or social networks of smart entities.   Therefore, the study of cognitive systems will likely progress from notions of “artificial individual intelligences” to “augmented collective intelligences” as one of the major transformations in the coming decade.  Large investments will be driven by nations and businesses with the goal of upgrading their employees and citizens collective IQ as part of building innovation capacity for smart service systems.