This challenge is concerned with the attempt to understand and model natural intelligence at various levels of abstraction, demonstrating results of our improved understanding in a succession of working robots.

Steering committee: Murray Shanahan (chair), Mike Denham, Steve Furber, Mark Lee, Aaron Sloman.

Progress

What follows is a short summary of the progress that has been made on Grand Challenge 5 since 2004 on three fronts: funding, community building, and science.

On the funding front, progress has been considerable. Both the European Commission and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) have funded a number of large-scale, multi-partner projects that bear directly on the aims of the challenge.

Examples of such projects funded by the European Union’s Cognitive Systems initiative include RobotCub, Cognitive Systems for Cognitive Assistants (CoSy), and Integrating Cognition, Emotion and Autonomy (ICEA). Each of these projects is multi-disciplinary - drawing on empirical work in neuroscience or animal behaviour - and uses brain-inspired and/or biologically-inspired computational architectures to control robots.

Relevant EPSRC-funded projects include COLAMN (A novel computing architecture for cognitive systems based on the laminar microcircuitry of the neocortex), REVERB (Integrative computation for autonomous agents: a novel approach based on the vertebrate brain), and machine consciousness through internal modelling.

The DTI's Cognitive Systems Foresight initiative, and the EPSRC's new and emergent computer paradigms initiative have been influential here.

On the community building front, the European Union has also become very supportive of research relevant to Grand Challenge 5. In particular, a European network -euCognition - has been set up to facilitate interaction between workers in this area. This network recently held its inaugural conference in Nice.

The euCognition network also funded a symposium at the 2006 annual conference of AISB (the UK's artificial intelligence society) in Bristol, specifically on Grand Challenge 5. The symposium had ten invited speakers, and was very well attended.

Later in the year, an EPSRC and NSF supported workshop on Cognitive Robotics is to be held in Windsor, which will give further opportunities for community building.

There is an unprecedented level of support and activity relevant to Grand Challenge 5, all of which (in contrast to most work on traditional artificial intelligence) emphasizes interdisciplinary engagement with empirical science, and does so in the context of deployment on a robotic platform.

Most of the above named projects and initiatives are barely underway. So it is too early to expect substantial scientific results from them. But a number of themes are emerging as important, such as embodiment (ie: the use of robots), brain-inspired architectures, animal behaviour, the developmental (ontogenetic) perspective, and the conscious / non-conscious distinction.

As the history of AI shows, the initial hype of adventurous research of this nature can soon lead to disappointment. But the Grand Challenge designation legitimizes such research on the grounds that it is inherently important.

Hopefully this will allow optimism to be tempered with caution while retaining the support of both the research community and society at large.

Discussion

It was reaffirmed that this challenge should be essentially inclusive, involving many disciplines, many different approaches and many different views. It would be united by its goals but allow all forms of contribution and opinion.

This means the challenge will have the role of promoting and legitimizing activity rather than formulating and developing any particular attack on the problem area. The challenge should inform and nurture work on the tasks involved and develop and refine the general understanding of progress on the key challenge stages.

This means the challenge is best served by GC5 being an 'open access' entity and it was decided that a website would be the most appropriate way of supporting this.

The website concept was well supported and was resolved that a professional website would be the next major development. Such an open website may become very large and so must be structured and managed, and funds will be sought for this.

The roles of the website will include promoting awareness (both public and scientific), providing information, exciting interest, and supporting collaboration and networking.

The aim is to highlight the various scientific themes, and allow consensus and controversies to be understood. Eventually, genuine fusions between disciplines may be encouraged and established.

Another matter was that it was agreed that the manifesto should be issued in a new two page version. It was also reported that CG5 was to feature in a major public engagement: AISB'06 in early April, and it is now known that this was a great success.