How Artificial Intelligence Research Tries to Build Intelligent Autonomous Systems
Can robots be creative enough to build their own language? Computational linguistics explores semiotics, its origins, evolution and dynamics with an interdisciplinary approach aimed at finding out statistics and rules to construct a computational model of natural language. Luc Steels, with more than 30 PhD theses granted under his direction, 200 articles published and 15 books edited (and an opera written about robots!) is one of the world’s leading experts in the area of artificial intelligence. During the last decade, he focused on dialogs for humanoid robots and fundamental research into the origins of language and meaning. Steels is able to interpret and validate the simulations performed by computers and to compare them with the theories of evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience and cultural dynamics. He is currently an ICREA professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra Barcelona, director of the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris and was founding director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Vrije Universiteit Brussels. At Falling Walls, Steels explains how close we are to understanding how the human brain evolved to allow the genesis of language, considering the potential benefits for the further development of artificial intelligence.