PIP-Bullet1-Cognitive Information Processing Technology DARPA BAA02-21

Subject: PIP-Bullet1-Cognitive Information Processing Technology DARPA BAA02-21

Cognitive Information Processing Technology
Proposer Information Pamphlet
Cognitive Information Processing Technology
SOL BAA 02-21 POC: Dr. Ronald J. Brachman, Mr. Zachary J. Lemnios, DARPA/IPTO
E-Mail: baa02-21@darpa.mil
FAX: (703) 741-7804
WEB: http://www.darpa.mil/ipto/Solicitations/index

This is the first set of bullet points I will address wrt to the PIP (Proposer Information Pamphlet) of the BAA. I will post these responses with their own number which relates only to the order in which I post them, and not in any other framework. I will keep these in a single file for myself, and that may prove useful for a later summary, but in any event, I hope we have some discussion on this ad hoc list, to which I request that responders use a "reply to all" option, to include both the OASIS TC list, the humanorg list and individuals. Feel free to forward or add addressees as it seems appropriate to you.

This what DARPA is asking for:

"...

The DARPA Information Technology Processing Office (IPTO) is soliciting innovative research proposals in the area of information technology for a new class of cognitive systems that can be characterized simply as follows: a cognitive system is one that, among other things,

* can reason in a variety of ways, using substantial amounts of appropriately represented knowledge;

* can learn from its experiences so that its performance improves as it accumulates knowledge and experience;

* can explain itself and can accept direction;

* can be aware of its own behavior and reflect on its own capabilities; and

* can respond in a robust manner to surprises.

..."

What we need to supply is an assessment of whether we in the HumanMarkup TC or Humanmarkup.org, Inc. can address these requirements sufficiently well to win an award for this research and development project.

Unfortunately, I think that definition begs the question of what is cognition by ignoring who or what is capable of cognition, which, for us in HumanML, means "who or what is a cognitive agent?"

To this question, we can supply our working definition of a human--basically any entity which claims it is a human, and which can be further discriminated as applying to the assertions made within a cognitive environment (a synchronous or asynchronous communication or set of communications by at least two separate entities), Such assertions must be made by an entity to having identity as a biological human or having identity as an agent of some kind which asserts some set of human characteristics and/or verifiable, authenticated, human computing permissions in a digital information system.

I think that what the BAA is calling a cognitive system is more along the lines of what has been called artificial intelligence, but which we call an agent, and which includes a set of programming instructions and algorithms capable of independent learning and assessing functions, and is also capable of independently arriving at heuristically derived conclusions, and then taking actions based on those conclusions.

To satisfy the expressed interests of this DARPA BAA, we must be able to develop a new class of such cognitive systems that

bullet 1:
* can reason in a variety of ways, using substantial amounts of appropriately represented knowledge;

I think we can take reason here as meaning to use logic to calculate, to account for or explain, to rationalize, to justify and to comprehend or understand data or facts as a verb, and as meaning a logical, rational, explanation or the power of comprehending, inferring or (debateably) thinking as a noun. Save for thinking which seems to imply an ability to originate a new, previously unthought, idea, I think we can satisfy the demand for reasoning in a variety of ways.

We can determine or confirm facts, and draw inferences from sets of facts in a given circumstance based on our Primary Base Specification. I think we can safely say that congition only occurs in a cognitive environment containing at least two interacting, communicating entities, and these are what we name semiotes. Therefore, we achieve innovation immediately once we apply HumanML, and, of course, we will then proceed on to what is, in essence, a stream of innovations, although mostly we are simply applying new analytic tools and, setting the stage to introduce our semiotic processor as part of the cybernetic feedback loop (communication in a digital information system).

One of the first things we need to emphasize, and for which we have actually prepared, is to assert our ability to assemble the appropriately represented knowledge in terms of the most-supported high-level ontologies (for which I happen to favor DAML-OIL) and in terms of our own practical taxonomy from actual ont-the-ground practice.

This is to say that we are developing our secondary vocabularies from working on practical applications. Thus we are satisfying the interest of reasoning in a variety of ways because we are working on a variety of applications which require their own specialized analytical structures, such as chats, presentations, conversations, motion capture of dance and other kinesics, comparisons, inferences, reports, and heuristic aids.

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