SIGNAL

The project will develop a combined strategy and structure (systemic architecture) enabling artefacts to grow up: a key feature for "living artefacts". Starting with a set of basic abilities (pre-defined by genotype) the knowledge grows with learning and experience, passing the artefact through a scheduled sequence of stages to an individually matured entity (phenotype).

Interdisciplinary concepts from evolutionary algorithms, neuroinformatics, psychology of learning, memory organisation and reasoning, robotics and linguistics will be combined within a test bed of two functional parts:
A) an autonomous robot growing up, driven by instinct and curiosity to explore and manipulate its own capabilities and the environment.
B) a self educating language sub-system, learning to understand and articulate percepted signals as a language (from signals to semantic). Project results will be the principles of systemic intelligence for growing up artefacts.

The project, making use of the combination of multidisciplinary expertise on an European level (neuroscience, neurocomputing and robotic, artificial intelligence and natural language processing, evolutionary computing and evolvable hardware, psychology of learning and linguistics), will develop, achieve and demonstrate design principles for growing (living) systems. Major functionalities that are required for "living artefacts", in particular for artefacts growing up from initial infantile state, via a sequence of stages to a fully matured entity are focused within this project. Novel methodologies and paradigms that are developed for the major topics are implemented and demonstrated with the test beds. Most of the work will be performed using computer simulations, software based implementations of the developed methods, experiments for validation with real existing test beds in real time. The results will be re-projected into psychology of learning and made accessible via publications on conferences and in journals.

Last updated: 2002-12-16