In order to build autonomous robots that can carry out useful work in unstructured environments new approaches have been developed to building intelligent systems. The relationship to traditional academic robotics and traditional artificial intelligence is examined. In the new approaches a tight coupling of sensing to action produces architectures for intelligence that are networks of simple computational elements which are quite broad, but not very deep. Recent work within this approach has demonstrated the use of representations, expectations, plans, goals, and (...) learning, but without resorting to the traditional uses, of central, abstractly manipulable or symbolic representations. Perception within these systems is often an active process, and the dynamics of the interactions with the world are extremely important. The question of how to evaluate and compare the new to traditional work still provokes vigorous discussion. (shrink)

Most animals have significant behavioral expertise built in without having to explicitly learn it all from scratch. This expertise is a product of evolution of the organism; it can be viewed as a very long term form of learning which provides a structured system within which individuals might learn more specialized skills or abilities. This paper suggests one possible mechanism for analagous robot evolution by describing a carefully designed series of networks, each one being a strict augmentation of the previous (...) one, which control a six legged walking machine capable of walking over rough terrain and following a person passively sensed in the infrared spectrum. As the completely decentralized networks are augmented. the robot’s performance and behavior repetoire demonstrably improve. The rationale for such demonstrations is that they may provide a hint as to the requirements for automatically building massive networks to carry out complex sensory-motor tasks. The experiments with an actual robot ensure that an essence of reality is maintained and that no critical disabling problems have been ignored. (shrink)

Both direct, and evolved, behavior-based approaches to mobile robots have yielded a number of interesting demonstrations of robots that navigate, map, plan and operate in the real world. The work can best be described as attempts to emulate insect level locomotion and navigation, with very little work on behavior-based non-trivial manipulation of the world. There have been some behavior-based attempts at exploring social interactions, but these too have been modeled after the sorts of social interactions we see in insects. But (...) thinking how to scale from all this insect level work to full human level intelligence and social interactions leads to a synthesis that is very di erent from that imagined in traditional Arti cial Intelligence and Cognitive Science. We report on work towards that goal. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence research has foundered on the issue of representation. When intelligence is approached in an incremental manner, with strict reliance on interfacing to the real world through perception and action, reliance on representation disappears. In this paper we outline our approach to incrementally building complete intelligent Creatures. The fundamental decomposition of the intelligent system is not into independent information processing units which must interface with each other via representations. Instead, the intelligent system is decomposed into independent and parallel activity (...) producers which all interface directly to the world through perception and action, rather than interface to each other particularly much. The notions of central and peripheral systems evaporateeverything is both central and peripheral. Based on these principles we have built a very successful series of mobile robots which operate without supervision as Creatures in standard office environments. (shrink)

Artificial Intelligence as a discipline has gotten bogged down in subproblems of intelligence. These subproblems are the result of applying reductionist methods to the goal of creating a complete artificial thinking mind. In Brooks (1987) 1 have argued that these methods will lead us to solving irrelevant problems; interesting as intellectual puzzles, but useless in the long run for creating an artificial being.

The first part of this paper explores the general issues in using Artificial Life techniques to program actual mobile robots. In particular it explores the difficulties inherent in transferring programs evolved in a simulated environment to run on an actual robot. It examines the dual evolution of organism morphology and nervous systems in biology. It proposes techniques to capture some of the search space pruning that dual evolution offers in the domain of robot programming. It explores the relationship between robot (...) morphology and program structure, and techniques for capturing regularities across this mapping. (shrink)

We describe an algorithm which allows a behavior-based robot to learn on the basis of positive and negative feedback when to activate its behaviors. In accordance with the philosophy of behavior-based robots, the algorithm is completely distributed: each of the behaviors independently tries to find out (i) whether it is relevant (ie. whether it is at all correlated to positive feedback) and (ii) what the conditions are under which it becomes reliable (i.e. the conditions under which i t maximizes the (...) probability of receiving positive feedback and minimizes the probability of receiving negative feedback). The algorithm has been tested successfully on an autonomous 6-legged robot which had to learn how to coordinate its legs so as to walk forward. (shrink)

There are a number of reasons to be interested in building humanoid robots. They include (1) since almost all human artifacts have been designed to easy for humans to interact with, humanoid robots provide backward compatibility with the existing human constructed world, (2) humanoid robots provide a natural form for humans to operate through telepresence since they have the same kinematic design as humans themselves, (3) by building humanoid robots that model humans directly they will be a useful tool in (...) understanding how humans develop and operate as they provide a platform for experimenting with different hypotheses about humans and (4) humanoid robots, given su cient abilities, will present a natural interface to people and people will be able to use their instinctive and culturally developed subconscious techniques for communicating with other people to communicate with humanoid robots. In this paper we take reason (4) seriously, and examine some of the technologies that are necessary to make this hope a reality. (shrink)

Applications of learning to autonomous agents (simulated or real) have often been restricted to learning a mapping from perceived state of the world to the next action to take. Often this is couched in terms of learning from no previous knowledge. This general case for real autonomous robots is very difficult. In any case, when building a real robot there is usually a lot of a priori knowledge (e.g., from the engineering that went into its design) which doesn’t need to (...) be learned. We describe the behavior-based approach to autonomous robots, and then examine four classes of learning problems associated with such robots. (shrink)

We want to build tiny gnat-sized robots, a millimeter or two in diameter. They will be cheap, disposable, totally sefcontained autonomous agents able to do useful things in the world. This paper consists of two parts. The first describes why we want to build them. The second is a technical outline of how to go about it. Gnat robots are going to change the world.

This paper presents an autonomous vision-based obstacle avoidance system. The system consists of three independent vision modules for obstacle detection, each of which is computationally simple and uses a di erent criterion for detection purposes. These criteria are based on brightness gradients, RGB Red, Green, Blue color, and HSV Hue, Saturation, Value color, respectively. Selection of which modules are used to command the robot proceeds exclusively from the outputs of the modules themselves. The system is implemented on a small monocular (...) mobile robot and uses very low resolution images. It has been tested for over 200 hours in diverse environments. Keywords: Vision-based navigation, space exploration, modular design, reactive control, unstructured terrain. (shrink)

Behavior based systems require an orthogonal view of integration issues. In this paper we highlight those issues, discuss what is easy, what is hard, and where the research frontiers lie.

We present a novel methodology for building humanlike artificially intelligent systems. We take as a model the only existing systems which are universally accepted as intelligent: humans. We emphasize building intelligent systems which are not masters of a single domain, but, like humans, are adept at performing a variety of complex tasks in the real world. Using evidence from cognitive science and neuroscience, we suggest four alternative essences of intelligence to those held by classical AI. These are the parallel themes (...) of development, social interaction, embodiment, and integration. Following a methodology based on these themes, we have built a physical humanoid robot. In this paper we present our methodology and the insights it affords for facilitating learning, simplifying the computation underlying rich behavior, and building systems that can scale to more complex tasks in more challenging environments. (shrink)

At the MIT Arti cial Intelligence Laboratory we have been working on technologies for an Intelligent Room. Rather than pull people into the virtual world of the computer we are trying to pull the computer out into the real world of people. To do this we are combining robotics and vision technology with speech understanding systems, and agent based architectures to provide ready at hand computation and information services for people engaged in day to day activities, both on their own (...) and in conjunction with others. We have built a layered architecture where at the bottom level vision systems track people and identify their activities and gestures, and through word spotting decide whether people in the room are talking to each other or to the room itself. At the next level an agent architecture provides a uniform interface to such specially built systems, and to other o the shelf software, such as web browsers, etc. At the highest level we are able to build application systems that provide occupants of the room with specialized services; examples we have built include systems for command and control situations rooms and as a room for giving presentations. (shrink)

Both direct, and evolved, behavior-based approaches to mobile robots have yielded a number of interesting demonstrations of robots that navigate, map, plan and operate in the real world. The work can best be described as attempts to emulate insect level locomotion and navigation, with very little work on behavior-based non-trivial manipulation of the world. There have been some behavior-based attempts at exploring social interactions, but these too have been modeled after the sorts of social interactions we see in insects. But (...) thinking how to scale from all this insect level work to full human level intelligence and social interactions leads to a synthesis that is very different from that imagined in traditional Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science. We report on work towards that goal. (shrink)

Complex systems and complex missions take years of planning and force launches to become incredibly expensive. The longer the planning and the more expensive the mission, the more catastrophic if it fails. The solution has always been to plan better, add redundancy, test thoroughly and use high quality components. Based on our experience in building ground based mobile robots (legged and wheeled) we argue here for cheap, fast missions using large numbers of mass produced simple autonomous robots that are small (...) b y today's standards (1 to 2 Kg). We argue that the time between mission conception and implementation can be radically reduced, that launch mass can be slashed, that totally autonomous robots can be more reliable than ground controlled robots, and that large numbers of robots can change the tradeoff between reliability of individual components and overall mission success. Lastly, we suggest that within a few years it will be possible at modest cost to invade a planet with millions of tiny robots. (shrink)

We have previously built a small IKg ([Angle 89] and [Brooks 89]) six legged walking robot named Genghis. It was remarkably successful as a testbed to develop walking and learning algorithms. It encouraged us to build a more fully engineered robot with higher performance. We are building two copies of the robot, both 1.6Kg in mass. Their generic name is Attila. Attila has 24 actuators and over 150 sensors, all connected via a local network (the I2C bus) to 11 onboard (...) computers. (shrink)

Background: The concept of moral distress has been the subject of nursing research for the past 30 years. Recently, there has been a call to move from developing an understanding of the concept to developing interventions to help ameliorate the experience. At the same time, the use of the term moral distress has been critiqued for a lack of clarity about the concepts that underpin the experience. Discussion: Some researchers suggest that a closer examination of how socio-political structures influence healthcare (...) delivery will move moral distress from being seen as located in the individual to an experience that is also located in broader healthcare structures. Informed by new thinking in relational ethics, we draw on research findings from neuroscience and attachment literature to examine the reciprocal relationship between structures and agents and frame the experience of moral distress. Conclusion: We posit moral distress as a form of relational trauma and subsequently point to the need to better understand how nurses as moral agents are influenced by—and influence—the complex socio-political structures they inhabit. In so doing, we identify this reciprocity as a framework for interventions. (shrink)

Moral distress is a phenomenon that has been receiving increasing attention in nursing and other health care disciplines. Moral distress is a concept that entered the nursing literature – and subsequently the health care ethics lexicon – in 1984 as a result of the work done by American philosopher and bioethicist Andrew Jameton. Over the past decade, research into moral distress has extended beyond the profession of nursing as other health care disciplines have come to question the impact of moral (...) constraint on individual practitioners, professional practice, and patient outcomes. Along with increased interest in the phenomenon of moral distress have come increasing critiques – critiques that in their essence point to a serious lack of conceptual clarity in the definition, study, and application of the concept. Foundational to gaining conceptual clarity in moral distress in order to develop strategies to prevent and ameliorate the experience is a careful revisiting of the epistemological assumptions underpinning our knowledge and use of the concept of moral distress. It is our contention that the conceptual challenges reveal flaws in the original understanding of moral distress that are based on an epistemological stance that holds a linear conception of cause and effect coupled with a simplistic perspective of ‘constraint’ and ‘agency’. We need a more nuanced approach to our study of moral distress such that our ontological and epistemological stances help us to better appreciate the complexity of moral agents acting in organizational contexts. We believe that critical realism offers such a nuanced approach. (shrink)

The first brief description is given of a project aimed at searching for the neural correlates of consciousness through computer simulation. The underlying model is based on the known circuitry of the mammalian nervous system, the neuronal groups of which are approximated as binary composite units. The simulated nervous system includes just two senses - hearing and touch - and it drives a set of muscles that serve vocalisation, feeding and bladder control. These functions were chosen because of their relevance (...) to the earliest stages of human life, and the simulation has been given the name CyberChild. The system's pain receptors respond to a sufficiently low milk level in the stomach, if there is simultaneously a low level of blood sugar, and also to a full bladder and an unchanged diaper. It is believed that it may be possible to infer the presence of consciousness in the simulation through observations of CyberChild's behaviour, and from the monitoring of its ability to ontogenetically acquire novel reflexes. The author has suggested that this ability is the crucial evolutionary advantage of possessing consciousness. The project is still in its very early stages, and although no suggestion of consciousness has yet emerged, there appears to be no fundamental reason why consciousness could not ultimately develop and be observed. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to announce there is a single orbit of the c.e. sets with inclusion, ε, such that the question of membership in this orbit is ${\Sigma _1^1 }$ -complete. This result and proof have a number of nice corollaries: the Scott rank of ε is $\omega _1^{{\rm{CK}}}$ + 1; not all orbits are elementarily definable; there is no arithmetic description of all orbits of ε; for all finite α ≥ 9, there is a properly $\Delta (...) _\alpha ^0 $ orbit (from the proof). (shrink)

Given two incomparable c.e. Turing degrees a and b, we show that there exists a c.e. degree c such that c = (a ⋃ c) ⋂ (b ⋃ c), a ⋃ c | b ⋃ c, and c < a ⋃ b.

This comprehensive compendium provides a rigorous framework to tackle the daunting challenges of designing correct and efficient algorithms. It gives a uniform approach to the design, analysis, optimization, and verification of algorithms. The volume also provides essential tools to understand algorithms and their associated data structures. This useful reference text describes a way of thinking that eases the task of proving algorithm correctness. Working through a proof of correctness reveals an algorithm's subtleties in a way that a typical description does (...) not. Algorithm analysis is presented using careful definitions that make the analyses mathematically rigorous. (shrink)

This is an exciting time for brain science. Recent progress has been such that it now seems realistic to look toward an explanation of mind in terms of the brain's anatomy and physiology. Models based on artificially symmetrical arrays of idealized neurons are now being superseded by ones which properly take into account the brain's actual circuitry. This book presents a comprehensive overview of the current state of brain modeling, containing contributions from many leading researchers in this field. It will (...) be of interest not only to researchers in the fields of brain science and neurobiology, but also to psychologists and those involved in the study of artificial intelligence. (shrink)

The title of this book was inspired by a passage in Charles Sherrington's Man on his Nature.

This paper addresses the question of whether astatute of limitations on injustice is morallyjustified. Rectificatory justice calls for theascription of a right to rectification once aninjustice has been perpetrated. To claim amoral statute of limitations on injustice is toclaim a temporal limit on the moral legitimacyof rights to rectification. A moral statute oflimitations on injustice establishes an amountof time following injustice after which claimsof rectification can no longer be valid. Such astatute would put a time limit on the life ofall (...) moral rights to rectification. Sinceascribing a right to rectification for aninjustice is a requirement of justice, andsince the temporal limit called for by astatute of limitations on injustice is aconstraint on that requirement, the idea of astatute of limitations on injustice is morallyjustified only if we have good reasonsfor accepting this constraint. I argue that theidea of a moral statute of limitations oninjustice is not justified, since we lackgood reasons for imposing the constrainton justice it requires. (shrink)

We describe new results in parametrized complexity theory. In particular, we prove a number of concrete hardness results for W[P], the top level of the hardness hierarchy introduced by Downey and Fellows in a series of earlier papers. We also study the parametrized complexity of analogues of PSPACE via certain natural problems concerning k-move games. Finally, we examine several aspects of the structural complexity of W [P] and related classes. For instance, we show that W[P] can be characterized in terms (...) of the DTIME ) and NP. (shrink)

This book presents a new transhistorical framework of defining production, work and consumption. It shows that they all share the common feature of intentional physical transformation of something external to the agent, at some point in time.

Cenzer, D., R. Downey, C. Jockusch and R.A. Shore, Countable thin Π01 classes, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 59 79–139. A Π01 class P {0, 1}ω is thin if every Π01 subclass of P is the intersection of P with some clopen set. Countable thin Π01 classes are constructed having arbitrary recursive Cantor- Bendixson rank. A thin Π01 class P is constructed with a unique nonisolated point A and furthermore A is of degree 0’. It is shown that no (...) set of degree ≥0” can be a member of any thin Π01 class. An r.e. degree d is constructed such that no set of degree d can be a member of any thin Π01 class. It is also shown that between any two distinct comparable r.e. degrees, there is a degree that contains a set which is of rank one in some thin Π01 class. It is shown that no maximal set can have rank one in any Π01 class, while there exist maximal sets of rank 2. The connection between Π01 classes, propositional theories and recursive Boolean algebras is explored, producing several corollaries to the results on Π01 classes. For example, call a recursive Boolean algebra thin if it has no proper nonprincipal recursive ideals. Then no thin recursive Boolean algebra can have a maximal ideal of degree ≥0”. (shrink)

This paper takes up the question of the place of martial arts in a Christian response to violence. In light of René Girard’s mimetic theory, how can, or should a person of faith consider the practice of martial arts for the purposes of self-protection? This paper will respond to the question by showing that, Girard’s theory situates humanity in the realm of an intermediary process awaiting the consummation of the kingdom of God. We shall discover that we are ‘on the (...) horn of a dilemma’ in having to contend with the excesses of unremitting violence and the deficiencies of cowardice. A surprising compliment to Christian ethical behaviour can be found in the Eastern martial arts, which will be more closely observed through the traditions of Japanese samurai culture. We shall discover that virtue can be found in self-defence through a balance of Christian principle and martial art practice, which promotes peace and harmony in a sin-riddled world. (shrink)

Although I do not find any of Sterba's responses to my recent criticisms of his work How to Make People Just convincing, I shall not attempt to answer them point by point since this would be a boring, scholastic exercise at best.1 Rather, I shall expand upon what I believe continue to be the three major problems with Sterba's theory and explain why his recent responses to my criticisms along these lines are not adequate.

Syme, Rodney Palliative care, founded by Cicely Saunders, a devout Christian, has grown from a single London hospice to a world-wide specialty with strong government support. It is one of the most important developments in modern medicine. It aims to provide compassionate and holistic care for the terminally ill. Nevertheless opposition on religious grounds to assisted-dying or hastening of death has been a core principle of palliative care from its origin, and persists today.

Presenting a wetlands calendar that charts the yearly cycle of the rising, falling, and drying waters of this internationally significant wetland, this book is a modern-day Walden.

We evaluate the effectiveness of impact investing from the perspective of the market failures approach (MFA) to business ethics. Under the MFA, businesses are ethically obligated to contribute to market efficiency by mitigating market failures. The MFA ethics literature emphasizes a negative externality interpretation of market failures, with ethical practice as self-regulation. We argue that the MFA also obligates businesses, and investors, to produce positive externalities, a form of private provision of public goods. We develop a graphical MFA ethical framework (...) addressed to impact investing. The framework is based on impact projects’ dual financial and social returns. Dual returns trade-offs originate in market failures and increase with positive externalities. In practice, a key determinant of market failure and the size of returns trade-offs is the availability of intermediate public goods. This varies systematically across sectors and country-markets. We identify the market circumstances under which impact investing is feasible. We show how provision of positive externalities mitigates market failures. We show that the effectiveness of impact investing depends on the interaction of the determinants of feasibility and of the size of project trade-offs. We show how government supporting intervention, through blended finance vehicles, can improve impact investing effectiveness. Finally, we show that evidence of actual patterns of impact investing across sectors and countries supports our analysis. (shrink)

"Written in a racy, persuasive style, the book impresses the reader as a work of significant scholarship...I encourage students of comparative religions- and especially those of Islamic economics- to read it with great care."&$151; Islamic Studies The worlds of economics and theology rarely intersect. The former appears occupied exclusively with the concrete equations of supply and demand, while the latter revolves largely around the less tangible concerns of the soul and spirit. Intended as an interfaith clarification of the relationship between (...) the material and the spiritual worlds, this volume first inspects secular beliefs about the relationship between economics and ethics. Exploring the differences and similarities between the treatment of economic issues in each of the great monotheistic religions, Rodney Wilson reveals how each tradition considers such subjects as individual wealth, lending, economic regulation, usury, insurance capitalism, socialism, and banking. He concludes with an intriguing epilogue on the rapidly expanding field of business ethics. (shrink)